"J.M. Coetzee, Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature" J. M. Coetzee is an internationally renowned novelist, essayist, and literary critic whose many books include The Childhood of Jesus and Age of Iron. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2003. The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones,...

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2003" George M. Fredrickson (1934–2008) was the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of U.S. History at Stanford University. His many books include Diverse Nations, Black Liberation, and White Supremacy. Albert M. Camarillo is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor of American History at Stanford University. Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism appear...

The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly,...

"Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Winners of the 2005 Erasmus Prize, Praemium Erasmianum Foundation" Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Simon Schaffer is professor of history of science at the University of Cambridge. Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author...

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His many books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He is a general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into...

Walter A. Kaufmann (1921-1980) was professor of philosophy at Princeton University and a world-renowned scholar and translator of Nietzsche. This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche...

Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) was one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned for his contributions to economics, the social sciences, and the history of ideas. He is the author of many books, including the influential Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and The Strategy of Economic Development. In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate...

R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He taught at Princeton University from 1936 to 1963. He was the author of many books, including the two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton), the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in 1960, and the translator of The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre. Isser...

Anne Carson was born in Canada and now lives partly in Iceland. She is an acclaimed poet, essayist, translator, and classicist, and has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur, the PEN/Nabokov Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her books Autobiography of Red and Nox were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library Anne...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was one of the greatest artists of the German Romantic period. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, and natural philosopher. David E. Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. One of the great classics of European literature, Faust is Goethe's most complex and profound work....