Bøker utgitt av HARVARD UNIV PR

During Guatemala's decades-long civil war, tens of thousands of children, many of them Indigenous Maya, were coerced or kidnapped from their homes. They became commodities in a booming private adoption business, and most wound up in the United States. Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of a global industry that thrives on exploitation.

¿Brilliant¿Timely and necessary.¿ ¿Financial Times¿Especially timely as we struggle to make sense of how it is that individuals and communities persist in holding beliefs that have been thoroughly discredited.¿ ¿Darren Frey, Science If reason is what makes us human, why do we behave so irrationally? And if it is so useful, why didn¿t it evolve in other animals? This groundbreaking account of the evolution of reason by two renowned cognitive scientists seeks to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue, helps us justify our beliefs, convince others, and evaluate arguments. It makes it easier to cooperate and communicate and to live together in groups. Provocative, entertaining, and undeniably relevant, The Enigma of Reason will make many reasonable people rethink their beliefs.¿Reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant¿Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?¿Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber [argue that] reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems¿[but] to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.¿ ¿Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker ¿Turns reason¿s weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well.¿ ¿Financial Times¿The best thing I have read about human reasoning. It is extremely well written, interesting, and very enjoyable to read.¿¿Gilbert Harman, Princeton University

THE written word and what the eye can see are brought together in this fascinating foray into the depiction of resistance to slavery through the modern medium of film. Davis, whose book The Return of Martin Guerre was written while she served as consultant to the French film of the same name, now tackles the large issue of how the moving picture industry has portrayed slaves in five major motion pictures spanning four generations. The potential of film to narrate the historical past in an effective and meaningful way, with insistence on loyalty to the evidence, is assessed in five films: Spartacus (1960), Burn! (1969), The Last Supper (1976), Amistad (1997), and Beloved (1998).Davis shows how shifts in the viewpoints of screenwriters and directors parallel those of historians. Spartacus is polarized social history; the films on the Caribbean bring ceremony and carnival to bear on the origins of revolt; Amistad and Beloved draw upon the traumatic wounds in the memory of slavery and the resources for healing them. In each case Davis considers the intentions of filmmakers and evaluates the film and its techniques through historical evidence and interpretation. Family continuity emerges as a major element in the struggle against slavery.Slaves on Screen is based in part on interviews with the Nobel prize -- winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, and with Manuel Moreno Fraginals, the historical consultant for The Last Supper. Davis brings a new approach to historical film as a source of "thought experiments" about the past. While the five motion pictures are sometimes cinematic triumphs, with sound history inspiring the imagination, Davis is critical of fictive scenes and characterswhen they mislead viewers in important ways. Good history makes good films.