The essays in this intriguing collection all discuss Claude Levi-Strauss' "Canonical Formula," which he created in 1955 as a means of anthropological investigation. This apparently mathematical formula relates myths to cultural artifacts, and is especially applicable to the study of mental processes. In his paper, Levi-Strauss argues that the similarities in the architecture of seemingly disparate groups suggests a cognitive pattern that is shared by humanity; a "...geometry that human endeavour has envisioned."

The purpose of the work is to test the significance of the Formula, which is controversial and, for some, worthless. Part one applies the Formula to ethnographic field data and shows how it can lead to a deeper understanding of cultural facts; part two applies it to a body of Classical myths as an analytical tool, and part three focuses on the formal and mathematical applications and developments of the formula.

The volume brings together international scholars - including Levi-Strauss, himself - from a variety of disciplines and offers important advances in structuralist thought. The essays build on each other to create a lucid, sophisticated work that pushes the limits of structuralism. This is a valuable book for scholars and advanced students of disciplines as diverse as anthropology, classical and religious studies, architecture, semiotics and mathematics.

"We were impressed by Code Complete...a pleasure to read, either straight through or as a reference. An invaluable $35 reference." - PC Week. This runaway bestseller is a practical guide to software design that discusses the art and science of constructing software. Examples are provided in C, Pascal, Basic, Fortran, and Ada, but the focus is on successful programming techniques.

Long considered the essential guide to Joyce's famously difficult work, Roland McHugh's Annotations to "Finnegans Wake" provides both novice readers and seasoned Joyceans with a wealth of information in an easy-to-use format uniquely suited to this densely layered text. Each page of the Annotations corresponds directly with a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer. The reader can thus look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate glossaries or other listings.

McHugh's richly detailed notes distill decades of scholarship, explicating foreign words, unusual English connotations and colloquial expressions, place names, historical events, song titles and quotations, parodies of other texts, and Joyce's diverse literary and popular sources. The third edition has added material reflecting fifteen years of research, including significant new insights from Joyce's compositional notebooks (the "Buffalo Notebooks"), now being edited for the first time.

A rich compendium of Herman Melville's greatest short works. Billy Budd, Sailor, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, and the complete short stories make a rich addition to any library.

It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it." So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, "Moby-Dick" is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, "Moby-Dick" is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

Throughout my childhood, my grandmother Yasmina, who was illiterate and grew up in a harem, repeated that to travel is the best way to learn and to empower yourself. "When a woman decides to use her wings, she takes big risks," she would tell me, but she was convinced that if you didn't use them, it hurt....

So recalls Fatema Mernissi at the outset of her mesmerizing new book. Of all the lessons she learned from her grandmother — whose home was, after all, a type of prison — the most central was that the opportunity to cross boundaries was a sacred privilege. Indeed, in journeys both physical and mental, Mernissi has spent virtually all of her life traveling — determined to "use her wings" and to renounce her gender's alleged legacy of powerlessness.

Bursting with the vitality of Mernissi's personality and of her rich heritage, Scheherazade Goes West reveals the author's unique experiences as a liberated, independent Moroccan woman faced with the peculiarities and unexpected encroachments of Western culture. Her often surprising discoveries about the conditions of and attitudes toward women around the world — and the exquisitely embroidered amalgam of clear-eyed autobiography and dazzling meta-fiction by which she relates those assorted discoveries — add up to a deliciously wry, engagingly cosmopolitan, and deeply penetrating narrative.

In her previous bestselling works, Mernissi — widely recognized as the world's greatest living Koranic scholar and Islamic sociologist — has shed unprecedented light on the lives of women in the Middle East. Now, as a writer and scholarly veteran of the high-wire act of straddling disparate societies, she trains her eyes on the female culture of the West.

For her book's inspired central metaphor, Mernissi turns to the ancient Islamic tradition of oral storytelling, illuminating her grandmother's feminized, subversive, and highly erotic take on Scheherazade's wife-preserving tales from The Arabian Nights — and then ingeniously applying them to her own lyrically embellished personal narrative. Interwoven with vivid ruminations on her childhood, her education, and her various international travels are the author's piquant musings on a range of deeply embedded societal conditions that add up, Mernissi argues, to a veritable "Western harem."

A provocative and lively challenge to the common assumption that women have it so much better in the West than anywhere else in the world, Mernissi's book is an entrancing and timely look at the way we live here and now. By inspiring us to reconsider even the most commonplace aspects of our culture with fresh eyes and a healthy dose of suspicion, Scheherazade Goes West offers an invigorating, candid, and entertaining new perspective on the themes and ideas to which Betty Friedan first turned us on nearly forty years ago.

This epic is Milton's most famous work, employing the heterodox theology later expounded in "De Doctrina Christiana".

'Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies ...' A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagans California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation the narrators of CLOUD ATLAS hear each others echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his extraordinary third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanitys dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.

First published in 1516, Saint Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism. Through the voice of the mysterious traveler Raphael Hythloday, More describes a pagan, communist city-state governed by reason. Addressing such issues as religious pluralism, women's rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism, and justified warfare, Utopia seems remarkably contemporary nearly five centuries after it was written, and it remains a foundational text in philosophy and political theory.

Preeminent More scholar Clarence H. Miller does justice to the full range of More's rhetoric in this new translation. Professor Miller includes a helpful introduction that outlines some of the important problems and issues that Utopia raises, and also provides informative commentary to assist the reader throughout this challenging and rewarding exploration of the meaning of political community.

It has been over a decade since the release of the now classic original edition of Murray's Mathematical Biology. Since then mathematical biology has grown at an astonishing rate and is well established as a distinct discipline. Mathematical modeling is now being applied in every major discipline in the biomedical sciences. Though the field has become increasingly large and specialized, this book remains important as a text that introduces some of the exciting problems that arise in biology and gives some indication of the wide spectrum of questions that modeling can address. Due to the tremendous development in the field this book is being published in two volumes. This first volume is an introduction to the field, the mathematics mainly involves ordinary differential equations that are suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses at different levels. For this new edition Murray is covering certain items in depth, giving new applications such as modeling marital interactions and temperature dependence sex determination.

Ulrich has no qualities in the sense that his self-awareness is completely divorced from his abilities. He is drawn into a project, the "Parallel Campaign", to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph's coronation in 1918.

Translated by Professor Vrinda Nabar and Professor Shanta Tumkur Arguably India's greatest gift to the world, The Bhagavadgita ('The Song of the Blessed') forms an episode in the sixth book of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata and is the supreme work of that religion. The Gita consists of the dialogue between Prince Arjuna and his mentor and friend, Lord Krishna, on the eve of the climactic battle of Kuruksetra. This discourse contains an exposition of the Hindu philosophy of Karma Yoga (disciplined action performed in the right spirit) as Prince Arjuna struggles with his understandable 'existential' anguish at having to join battle against his gurus and kinsmen. The Gita, although almost 2,500 years old, contains profound truths of great relevance to contemporary society in India and the West.

This is the novel that first established Nabokov's reputation with a large audience tour-de-force of comic satire on sex and the American ways of life.