Tag archieven: Yale University Press

Amerikaanse geschiedenis, Biografie, Slavernij

Angela F. Murphy – Jermain Wesley Loguen biografie

Angela F. Murphy Jermain Wesley Loguen biografie review, recensie en informatie boek over de koning van Underground Railroad. Op 28 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press in de reeks Black Lives de biografie van abolitionist Jermain Wesley Loguen. Het boek is geschreven door Angela F. Murphy. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.

Angela F. Murphy Jermain Wesley Loguen biografie review en recensie

  • “For too long, Loguen’s incredible activism, courage, and contributions to Black freedom have been understudied. For his life, we owe Loguen a great debt. For Angela Murphy’s painstaking scholarship, we owe deep gratitude.” (Kellie Carter Jackson)
  • “Angela F. Murphy, author of the definitive study of the ‘Jerry Rescue,’ has written a superb biography of a leader of that struggle, the Reverend Jermain Loguen, himself a fugitive slave from middle Tennessee.” (R.J.M. Blackett)
  • “Murphy shines a brilliant spotlight on a vital but underappreciated abolitionist. This is the definitive account of a defiant fugitive who sought, for himself and others, a land for the free and homes for the brave.” (W. Caleb McDaniel)

Angela F. Murphy Jermain Wesley Loguen biografie

Jermain Wesley Loguen

Defiant Fugitive

  • Auteur: Angela F. Murphy (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: biografie
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Reeks: Black Lives
  • Verschijnt: 28 oktober 2025
  • Omvang: 312 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 30,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst van de biografie van Jermain Wesley Loguen

A gripping biography of a man who escaped slavery to become an influential abolitionist, famously known as the King of the Underground Railroad.

Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813–1872) was a fugitive from slavery, an abolitionist, and a minister, teacher, and political activist. He worked alongside Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and his home in Syracuse, New York, was among the most publicized Underground Railroad stations in the northern states. Loguen’s political commitments in the years before the Civil War were carried out at great personal risk, for he had liberated himself from slavery in Tennessee and was in constant danger of being captured and reenslaved under the Fugitive Slave Law. Defiantly, however, he refused to purchase his own freedom, an act that he believed would have legitimized the rights of slaveholders. In addition to aiding fellow fugitives from slavery, Loguen worked tirelessly to promote Black equality and uplift throughout upstate New York and Canada. After Emancipation, he extended his work to aid freedpeople in the South and to advocate for Black equality on a national scale.

In this engaging study, Angela F. Murphy follows Loguen from his early years through his transformation into one of the brightest stars in the constellation of abolitionists and reformers in New York.

Angela F. Murphy is a professor in the Department of History at Texas State University. She is the author of The Jerry Rescue: The Fugitive Slave Law, Northern Rights, and the American Sectional Crisis. She lives in Wimberley, Texas.

Bijpassende boeken

Biografie, Filosofie, Filosoof

Anthony Gottlieb – Ludwig Wittgenstein biografie

Anthony Gottlieb Ludwig Wittgenstein biografie recensie, review en informatie over de inhoud van het boek over de filosoof. Op 21 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press in de reeks Jewish Lives de biografie van de Oostenrijks-Britse filosoof Ludwig Wittgenstein. Het boek is geschreven door Anthony Gottlieb . Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.

Anthony Gottlieb Ludwig Wittgenstein biografie recensie en review

  • “With philosophical sophistication and writerly grace, Anthony Gottlieb crafts a narrative rich with historical and intellectual detail and subtlety. But though the vistas can be broad, the result is an intimate portrait of a thinker who redefined the boundaries of philosophy.” (Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York University)
  • “The outline of Wittgenstein’s life is well known. But he remains enigmatic, and in this book Anthony Gottlieb casts valuable new light on the role of his family, and of his wider intellectual and musical environment, in fashioning the strange and contradictory genius he became.” (Simon Blackburn)

Anthony Gottlieb Ludwig Wittgenstein biografie

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes

  • Auteur: Anthony Gottlieb (Engeland)
  • Soort boek: biografie van de Oostenrijks-Britse filosoof
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Reeks: Jewish Lives
  • Verschijnt: 21 oktober 2025
  • Omvang: 232 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 28,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst van de Ludwig Wittgenstein biografie van Anthony Gottlieb

The first biography in more than three decades of the Austrian-born thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.

According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), philosophy is a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought and his place in the history of philosophy.

Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cultlike following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna.

Gottlieb’s meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him.

Anthony Gottlieb is born in 1956. He is an author, book critic, and former executive editor of The Economist. He is the author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance and The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.

Bijpassende boeken

Amerikaanse Schrijvers, Biografie

Steven J. Zipperstein – Philip Roth biografie

Steven J. Zipperstein Philip Roth biografie recensie, review en informatie over de inhoud van het boek over de Amerikaanse schrijver. Op 14 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press in de reeks Jewish Lives de nieuwe Philip Roth biografie. Het boek is geschreven door Steven J. Zipperstein. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.

Steven J. Zipperstein Philip Roth biografie recensie en review

  • “Steven Zipperstein’s appreciation of Philip Roth is literary biography at its best. Acute and original judgments of Roth’s written worlds come embraided with revelatory portrayals of the worlds Roth inhabited, scrutinized, and provoked, and of Roth himself, solemn and hilarious, voraciously curious, a boundless sensual spirit riven by his craft.” (Sean Wilentz)
  • “This is one of the fairest and finest literary biographies I have read, with the emphasis on literary. Zipperstein does Philip Roth and his life’s work more than justice. He has produced a book that is a work of literature itself. Not every writer is what Roth called (and was called) ‘a writer’s writer.’ And not every scribe who undertakes to write a major life is truly a writer’s biographer. Zipperstein is one.” (Judith Thurman)

Steven J. Zipperstein Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Strung by Life

  • Auteur: Steven J. Zipperstein (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: biografie
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Reeks: Jewish Lives
  • Verschijnt: 14 oktober 2025
  • Omvang: 368 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 28,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst van de biografie van Philip Roth door Steven J. Zipperstein

A landmark biography of one of our most prominent chroniclers of American life.

In this groundbreaking literary biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures the complex life and astonishing work of Philip Roth (1933–2018), one of America’s most celebrated writers. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and books were often set—Roth wrote with ambition and awareness of what was required to produce great literature. No writer was more dedicated to his craft, even as he was rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances. And yet, as much as Roth wrote about sex and self, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words).

Zipperstein explores the unprecedented range of Roth’s work—from “Goodbye, Columbus” and Portnoy’s Complaint to the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Drawing on extensive archival materials and over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth about his life and work, Zipperstein provides an intimate and insightful look at one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, placing his work in the context of his obsessions, as well as American Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality.

Steven J. Zipperstein is born in 1950. He is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing and Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Bijpassende boeken

Geschiedenisboeken, Mythologie

Matthias Egeler – Elves and Fairies

Matthias Engeler Elves and Fairies review, recensie en informatie boek met een korte geschiedenis van elfen, feeën en de andere wereld. Op 14 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press de Engelse vertaling van Elfen und Feen, geschreven door Matthias Egeler, de professor oude Noordse literatuur en kultuur van de Goethe Universiteit in Frankfurt am Main. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Matthias Egeler Elves and Fairies review en recensie

  • “A genuinely magical book, even though it is also hardheaded and profoundly scholarly. We begin in the magic of a meadow in Iceland full of flowers and warmth, and travel by way of Scotland and Germany to a wide range of fairy lands of the imagination. Gloriously attentive to the details of landscape and story, this book maps a rich landscape of the playful and the deadly. An outstanding contribution.” (Diane Purkiss, author of Fairies and Fairy Stories)
  • “Beginning in Iceland and Ireland, this is a splendid and masterful study of the different kinds of elves and fairies found in European culture – a model of clarity, absorbing and enriching.” (Séamus Mac Mathúna, Emeritus Professor of Irish and Celtic Studies, Ulster University)
  • “Clap if you believe in fairies? Certainly, and elves too, if they are like the ones so lovingly explained in Matthias Egeler’s book.” (Alberto Manguel, author of Fabulous Monsters)

Matthias Egeler Elves and Fairies

Elves and Fairies

A Short History of the Otherworld

  • Auteur: Matthias Egeler (Duitsland)
  • Soort boek: elfen en feeën boek
  • Origineel: Elfen und Feen (2024)
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Verschijnt: 14 oktober 2025
  • Omvang: 256 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 26.00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek van Matthias Egeler over elfen en feeën

An enchanting history of the otherworld of elves and fairies, from the nature spirits of Iceland and Ireland to Avalon and Middle Earth.

Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings and Arthurian legend, these sprites have undergone huge transformations. From J. R. R. Tolkien’s warlike elves, based on medieval legend, to little flower fairies whose charms even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle succumbed to, they permeate European art and culture.

In this engaging cultural history, Matthias Egeler explores these mythical creatures of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and England, and their continental European cousins. Egeler goes on a journey through enchanted landscapes and literary worlds. He describes both their friendly and their dangerous, even deadly, sides. We encounter them in the legends of King Arthur’s round table and in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the terrible era of the witch trials, in magic’s peaceful conquest of Victorian bourgeois salons, in the child-friendly form of Peter Pan, and even as helpers in the contemporary fight against environmental destruction.

Matthias Egeler was born in 1980. He is professor of Old Norse literature and culture at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, after years at Oxford, Cambridge, and Munich. His research focuses on Old Norse literary, cultural, and religious history; the literary and religious history of medieval Ireland; and the world of Icelandic folk tales.

Bijpassende boeken

Amerikaanse muziek, Biografie, Muziek, Popmuziek

Jane Eisner – Carole King biografie

Jane Eisner Carole King biografie recensie, review en informatie over de inhoud van het boek over de Amerikaanse zangeres en songwriter. Op 16 september 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press in de reeks Jewish Lives de Carole King biografie. Het boek is geschreven door Jane Eisner. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.

Jane Eisner Carole King biografie recensie en review

  • “Jane Eisner movingly traces King’s journey to become one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of all time. This masterful biographer’s evocative interpretations of King’s music will spur readers to update their playlists to listen, with new appreciation, to her songs.” (Pamela S. Nadell)
  • “Eisner’s portrait is a thoughtful, nuanced, and intelligent take on a reluctant pop star.” (June Sawyers, Booklist)

Jane Eisner Carole King Biografie

Carole King

She Made the Earth Move

  • Auteur: Jane Eisner (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: biografie, muziekboek
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Reeks: Jewish Lives
  • Verschijnt: 16 september 2025
  • Omvang: 280 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 28,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van de biografie van Carole Kings de zangeres en songwriter

Jane Eisner traces the professional accomplishments and personal challenges of pop icon Carole King, exploring her unique contribution to American music.

Carole King’s extraordinary career has defined American popular music for more than half a century. Born in New York City in 1942, she shaped the soundtrack of 1960s teen culture with such songs as “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” one of many Brill Building classics she wrote with her first husband, Gerry Goffin. She was a leading figure in the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s, with dozens of Billboard Hot 100 hits and music awards—her 1971 album Tapestry won a record four Grammys. Yet she struggled to reconcile her fame with her roles as a wife and mother and retreated to the backwoods of Idaho, only to emerge in recent years as a political activist and the subject of the Tony-winning Broadway show Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.

Journalist and author Jane Eisner places King’s life in historical and cultural context, revealing details of her humble beginnings in Jewish Brooklyn, the roots of her musical genius, her four marriages, and her anguish about public life. Drawing on numerous interviews as well as historical and contemporary sources, this book brings to life King’s professional accomplishments, her personal challenges, and her lasting contributions to the great American songbook.

Jane Eisner is born on 31 December 1955. She is a widely published journalist who held leadership positions at the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Forward. She is the author of Taking Back the Vote. Eisner lives in New York City.

Bijpassende boeken

Amerikaanse geschiedenis, Geschiedenisboeken, Verenigde Staten

Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy – Republic and Empire

Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy Republic and Empire review, recensie en informatie boek over de Amerikaanse Revolutie. Op 16 september 2025 verschijnt Yale University Press het boek geschreven door de historici Trevor Burnard en Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy over crisis, revolutie en de vroege onafhankelijkheid van Amerika. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het geschiedenisboek verkrijgbaar.

Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy Republic and Empire review

  • “In this impressive distillation of a wide range of imperial scholarship, the authors present a compelling case for recognizing both the roots and the course of the American Revolution as profoundly influenced by events in the wider British Empire following its expansion in and immediately after the Seven Years’ War.” (Stephen Conway, University College London)
  • “Timely, critically important contribution to our understanding of the American nation’s origins in a constitutional crisis and civil war that led half of Britain’s American colonies to declare independence. Balancing a welcome emphasis on the uncertain progress of the war with convincing accounts of why so many other colonies remained loyal, Burnard and O’Shaughnessy illuminate the contingent contexts that shaped individual and collective decisions in a revolutionary age.” (Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia)

Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy Republic and Empire

Republic and Empire

Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence

  • Auteurs: Trevor Burnard, Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
  • Soort boek: Amerikaanse geschiedenis
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Verschijnt: 16 september 2025
  • Omvang: 320 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 35.00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst boek over de Amerikaanse Revolutie als een mondiale gebeurtenis

A fresh look at the American Revolution as a major global event.

At the time of the American Revolution (1765–83), the British Empire had colonies in India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Canada, Ireland, and Gibraltar. The thirteen rebellious American colonies accounted for half of the total number of provinces in the British world in 1776. What of the loyal half? Why did some of Britain’s subjects feel so aggrieved that they wanted to establish a new system of government, while others did not rebel? In this authoritative history, Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy show that understanding the long-term causes of the American Revolution requires a global view.

As much as it was an event in the history of the United States, the American Revolution was an imperial event produced by the upheavals of managing a far-flung set of imperial possessions during a turbulent period of reform. By looking beyond the familiar borders of the Revolution and considering colonies that did not rebel—Quebec, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, India, the British Caribbean, Senegal, and Ireland—Burnard and O’Shaughnessy go beyond the republican, liberal, and democratic aspects of the emerging American nation, providing a broader history that transcends what we think we know about the Revolution.

Trevor Burnard was born on 15 October 1960 in Dunedin, New Zealand. He was Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and director of the Wilberforce Institute. He was the author of numerous books on Caribbean plantation history and imperial history and served as editor of the Oxford Bibliography Online in Atlantic History. Burnard died on 19 July 2024, at the age of 63.

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy was born in in 1959 in Cheshire, Engeland. He is professor of history at the University of Virginia. His books include An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean and the prizewinning The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire.

Bijpassende boeken

Arabische geschiedenis, Geschiedenisboeken, Islam

Gabriel Said Reynolds – Christianity and the Qur’an

Gabriel Said Reynolds Christianity and the Qur’an review, recensie en informatie boek over de opkomst van de islam in christelijk Arabië. Op 2 september 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press het boek van Gabriel Said Reynolds, Crowley Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Gabriel Said Reynolds Christianity and the Qur’an review en recensie

  • “Gabriel Reynolds is one of the leading scholars of the Qur’an working anywhere in the world today. Christianity and the Qur’an represents the culmination of many years of meticulous study on this topic. Reynolds skillfully synthesizes a vast amount of disparate secondary scholarship, combining this with his deep knowledge of the Qur’anic text to make a very interesting and important argument about Christianity and the Qur’an’s environment, audience, and overall purpose. It will be an instant classic and point of reference for further studies in this area.” (Jack Tannous, Princeton University)
  • “Gabriel Said Reynolds—one of the most creative and consequential scholars in Qur’anic studies today—helps us see Islam’s holy book as if anew: as a text profoundly shaped by the Christian communities and ideas that saturated late antique Arabia. A bold, thought-provoking portrait of the Qur’an and its fundamental relationship with Christianity.” (Christian Sahner, University of Oxford)
  • “A must-read for all students and scholars interested in studying the Qurʾan in its formative period. Reynolds’ handling of the secondary literature is informative, comprehensive, and incisively critical.” (Shady Nasser, Harvard University)

Gabriel Said Reynolds Christianity and the Qur'an

Christianity and the Qur’an

The Rise of the Islam in Christian Arabia

  • Auteur: Gabriel Said Reynolds (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: geschiedenis van de Islam
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Verschijnt: 2 september 2025
  • Omvang: 288 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: paperback / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 30.00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek over de opkomst van de Islam in christelijk Arabië

A leading Qur’anic scholar’s revisionary account of how Islam emerged in dialogue with Christian traditions.

Challenging the dominant narrative about the history of the Qur’an and the emergence of Islam in a predominantly pagan context, Gabriel Said Reynolds presents the Qur’an as a text born within a largely Christian culture. As he examines the ways the Qur’an engages with Christian traditions—not only those of the New Testament but also those of late antique Christian literature—and with Christians themselves, Reynolds also draws on recent scholarship on pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions suggesting that monotheism, Christianity in particular, was a significant presence in the pre-Islamic Hijaz, the region in which Muhammad preached.

This study re-situates the Qur’an as a text thoroughly concerned with Christianity, not just the longer narratives of individuals such as Mary and Jesus but also passages that do not mention Christians explicitly. The Qur’an’s stance toward Christianity is on occasion controversial, aiming to advance Islamic theology and undermine Christian apologetical arguments, yet the Qur’an is not always polemical. At times, the text makes use of the audience’s knowledge of the Bible to advance its own vision of God and God’s relationship with humanity.

Gabriel Said Reynolds is the Crowley Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Qur’an and the Bible and Allah: God in the Qur’an. He lives in Granger, Indiana.

Bijpassende boeken

Geschiedenisboeken, Maan, Middeleeuwen

Ayoush Lazikani – The Medieval Moon

Ayoush Lazikani The Medieval Moon review, recensie en informatie boek over hoe de Middeleeuwse mens de maan ervoer. Op 9 september 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press het boek van Ayoush Lazikani die docent aan de Universiteit van Oxford, gespecialiseerd middeleeuwse literatuur. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Ayoush Lazikani The Medieval Moon review en recensie

  • “The Medieval Moon presents not a moon, but the moons of poets and natural philosophers, astrologers and travellers from areas as far apart from one another as Japan, China, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the kingdoms of Christendom. Lazikani’s approach is as cross-cultural as it is interdisciplinary, written in a style that is both entertaining and erudite, filled with wonderful stories from a broad array of traditions.” (Scott E. Hendrix, Carroll University)
  • “This book tells the extraordinary global story of the imaginative power of the medieval moon, via Sufi poetry and Zodiac men, Old English riddles and Inca statues, Andalusian medicine and Old Norse theology. The Medieval Moon is a beautiful and innovative book, accessibly written, rigorously researched, and touched by the transformative potential of its subject.” (Marion Turner, author of The Wife of Bath)

Ayoush Lazikani The Medieval Moon

The Medieval Moon

A History of Haunting and Blessing

  • Auteur: Ayoush Lazikani
  • Soort boek: Middeleeuwse geschiedenis
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Verschijnt: 9 september 2025
  • Omvang: 272 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 30.00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek over de beleving van de maan in de middeleeuwen

A vivid new history of how medieval people around the world perceived the moon.

When they gazed at the moon, medieval people around the globe saw an object that was at once powerful and fragile, distant and intimate—and sometimes all this at once. The moon could convey love, beauty, and gentleness; but it could also be about pain, hatred, and violence. In its circularity the moon was associated with fullness and fertility. Yet in its crescent and other shifting forms, the moon could seem broken, even wounded.

In this beautifully illustrated history, Ayoush Lazikani reveals the many ways medieval people felt and wrote about the moon. Ranging across the world, from China to South America, Korea to Wales, Lazikani explores how different cultures interacted with the moon. From the idea that the Black Death was caused by a lunar eclipse to the wealth of Persian love poetry inspired by the moon’s beauty, this is a truly global account of our closest celestial neighbour.

Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. A specialist in medieval literature, she is the author of Cultivating the Heart and Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, and an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages.

Bijpassende boeken

Biografie, Schotland, Schotse schrijver

Leo Damrosch – Storyteller The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Leo Damrosch Storyteller The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson review, recensie en informatie biografie van de Schotse schrijver. Op 2 september 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press de biografie van Robert Louis Stevenson, geschreven door Leo Damrosch. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.

Leo Damrosch Storyteller The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson review en recensie

  • “Damrosch brings to Stevenson’s life the calm, humane interpretive powers that he deployed with such success in The Club … Stevenson was a master of sensory clarity, [and] learning how he achieved his ‘kinetic’ effects is one of the great pleasures of this excellent book.” (Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal)
  • “In this biography told as an adventure story, Leo Damrosch convincingly portrays R. L. Stevenson as one of the most endearing writers in the English language.” (Alberto Manguel, author)
  • “This will now stand as the standard modern life of Robert Louis Stevenson, its scholarly authority enhanced by its readability. The events of Stevenson’s extraordinary life are narrated with verve, and RLS himself is brought vividly before us, his complexity and charisma conveyed without any note of hagiography (or, conversely, critical debunking).” (Ian Duncan, University of California)
  • “Is there a better biographer alive today than Leo Damrosch? His latest, a full-scale biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, is a brilliant storytelling achievement worthy of both its title and the redoubtable subject at its center. Stevenson lived more in his forty-four years than most do in a lifetime.” (Morten Høi Jensen)

Leo Damrosch Storyteller The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Storyteller

The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

  • Auteur: Leo Damrosch (Verenigde Staten)
  • Soort boek: biografie
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Verschijnt: 2 september 2025
  • Omvang: 584 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs $ 35,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van de biografie van de Schotse schrijver Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific.

Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist.

In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic.

Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (National Book Award finalist); Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age and Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist). He lives in Newton, MA.

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Engelse historicus, Geschiedenisboeken, Oorlogsgeschiedenis, Tweede Wereldoorlog

Gareth Williams – The Impossible Bomb

Gareth Williams The Impossible Bomb review, recensie en informatie de verborgen geschiedenis van Britse wetenschappers en de race om een ​​atoombom te ontwikkelen. Op 2 september 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press het boek van Gareth Williams de emeritus hoogleraar van de University van Bristol over de rol van Britse wetenschappers bij de ontwikkeling van de atoombom. er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Gareth Williams The Impossible Bomb review en recensie

  • “Winston Churchill’s wartime military assistant Ian Jacob quipped to him that the Allies won the war ‘because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.’ Three of these scientific refugees from 1930s Nazi Germany who became British citizens played key roles in the pivotal British contribution to creating the apparently all-American atomic bomb—the subject of Gareth Williams’s history, which reveals and brings to life this crucial but unfamiliar drama.” (Andrew Robinson, author of Einstein on the Run)
  • “An engaging, well-researched account … The Impossible Bomb reads like an eye-witness account. With colorful descriptions, Williams portrays the British scientists who contributed their insights and expertise to the atomic bomb project. His book is a timely tribute on the 80th anniversary of the Anglo-American project’s success.” (Cynthia C. Kelly, president, Atomic Heritage Foundation)
  • “A significant contribution to our understanding of ‘the most significant international collaboration of the 20th century.’ It’s eminently readable, too.” (Christopher Harding, Telegraph)

Gareth Williams The Impossible Bomb

The Impossible Bomb

The Hidden History of British Scientists and the Race to Create an Atomic Weapon

  • Auteur: Gareth Williams (Engeland)
  • Soort boek: oorlogsgeschiedenis
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Yale University Press
  • Verschijnt: 2 september 2025
  • Omvang: 480 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
  • Prijs: $ 40.00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek over de rol van Britse wetenschappers bij de atoombom

The remarkable story of the forgotten British scientists who enabled the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.

Atomic weaponry is widely understood as a story of American scientific achievement—but scientists working in Britain played a vital role in its development. Including Nobel Prize winners and Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, these scientists have long since been forgotten. But without their expertise, Robert Oppenheimer’s research at Los Alamos would never have succeeded.

Gareth Williams unearths the true story of the top-secret British atomic programme, codenamed “Tube Alloys,” established in 1940. These pioneering scientists struggled to convince sceptics in Britain and the USA that an atomic “super-bomb” capable of destroying entire cities was feasible, and could be built in time to influence the outcome of the Second World War. Williams shows how the British atomic programme, despite the often disruptive involvement of political leaders such as Winston Churchill, was vital to the success of the Manhattan Project.

The Impossible Bomb sheds new light on how humanity’s deadliest weapons came to exist—and the massive destruction they wrought.

Gareth Williams is emeritus professor and former dean of medicine at the University of Bristol. He is the author of over 200 medical papers and 20 books, including Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox and Unravelling the Double Helix.

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