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Geoffrey Wall¿s narrative biography of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the father of the author of Madame Bovary, follows him from his birth in a French provincial town a few years before the Revolution through to his distinguished career as a physician in an industrial city. Growing up under the corrosive anguish of the Terror, he emerged as a talented schoolboy who read Voltaire and imbibed the radical materialism of the 1790s. As an aspiring medical student in Paris, he embraced the new scientific medicine and climbed the ladder of his profession by avoiding military service. As a young doctor animated by humanitarian ideals, he was appointed to run a large hospital in Rouen where too many factory workers were dying young, the most insidious public health problem of the new age. He was to remain there for thirty years. Drawing on archival sources in Paris, Rouen and Sens, the book includes meticulous period details, such as an account of postoperative care in the age before anaesthetics. The author asks what happened to Enlightenment ideals in the age of industry and examines the conflict between science and religion. This is not only a biography of an eminent nineteenth-century physician but a collective moral history of the Napoleon generation.

Why are we so obsessed with cars? Shiny objects of desire, cars never cease to fascinate us. As symbols of freedom they return again and again in art and film, even if real freedom is sometimes only achieved in the final explosive crash ¿ the climax of the sheer exhilaration of speed. ¿Car crash culture¿ is a symptom of the twentieth century, Ricarda Vidal argues in this book, revealing that our love of the car and technology is caused by the continuing influence of turn-of-the-century ideas: the Futurist technological utopia and the Romantic return to nature and desire. Artists, writers and filmmakers have explored this troubled love affair with the automobile throughout the past century. The work of F. T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard (Week End), Richard Sarafian (Vanishing Point), J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg (Crash), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof) and Sarah Lucas, among others, are shown to pursue these ideals, even as developments in modern cities and telecommunications continue to change the nature of speed and technology. While the first half of the twentieth century was concerned with the celebration of speed and acceleration, the car crash has now become an obsession of contemporary culture. Vidal concludes that our attraction to the car crash reflects the contemporary way of life in the West, which is defined by a Futurist technophilia, a Romantic longing for a higher meaning and an undeniable infatuation with the automobile.

The transition to a sustainable society is a profound challenge to ethics and political thought, as well as to humankind. It is comparable to the great transitions of the past, such as the Enlightenment. Yet the distinguished tradition of groundbreaking ideas has not so far been widely invoked in public debates in this area. What can we learn from the history of ethics and political thought to enable us to cope with climate change? Climate change and sustainability are not just technical problems or problems in applied ethics: they require a new political imagination. Melissa Lane identifies Key messages ¿ on the role of the individual, the household, the nature of citizenship, and the significance of the imagination ¿ which bring the wisdom of the past to bear on the challenges of the present. Using these resources, and building on these insights, she calls for the construction of a ¿new normal¿, remaking our imagination of our society and our selves. Drawing on Platös Republic as a model while also challenging aspects of Platonic politics, the book sets out the political and psychological challenges that we face in moving beyond the psycho-political settlement of modern commercial society.

In 2011, New Zealand rugby fans erupted in celebration as the All Blacks narrowly defeated France to win the Rugby World Cup ¿ the team¿s first title since New Zealand hosted the inaugural tournament in 1987. In the years between these victories, the sport of rugby has been radically transformed from its amateur roots to a professional, global entertainment ¿product¿. This book explores these developments and focuses initially on the New Zealand Rugby Union¿s key deals with Rupert Murdoch¿s News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s. The new pay-per-view era has curtailed the traditional ¿viewing rights¿ of rugby fans to have live, free-to-air access to All Blacks test matches on public television. Adidas, meanwhile, has relentlessly commodified aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity in pursuit of local and global markets while exploiting labour in developing countries. Escalating merchandise costs and ticket prices have, at the same time, pushed the sport further out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders. All of these issues, however, have not gone uncontested, and the authors argue that rugby remains a contested terrain in the face of a new set of limits and pressures in the global economy.