Bøker utgitt av W. W. Norton & Company

Risks seem to abound in our everyday lives, especially the risks flowing from the explosion of our modern technology, with its pesticides, pollution, nuclear power, microwave radiation and chemical trace elements in food of all kinds. Two questions face all of us: how real are these risks and, if real, how do we manage our lives in order to avoid personal damage from them? The book examines these questions, delving into the nature and true seriousness of risk (as opposed to how bad the risk seems to be), into how we measure risk and how we regulate it. Lewis includes the latest scientific information on carcinogens and the greenhouse effect as well as detailed discussion of road safety, the risk of air travel, nuclear power and acid rain.

On the morning of April 26, 1986, a Soviet nuclear plant at Chernobyl (near Kiev) exploded, pouring radioactivity into the environment and setting off the worst disaster in the history of nuclear energy. Now a former Soviet scientist gives a comprehensive account of the catastrophe.

Bartók's virtuosic Concerto for Orchestra, his opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, and his Mikrokosmos for solo piano are some of the works by this great Hungarian composer that are admired and performed throughout the Western world. Yet Béla Bartók, the man, remains something of an enigma-remote, ascetic, uncompromising in his person and in his art.

This book enables the reader to determine styles and identify architectural terms by comparing real buildings with the book's many photographs.

Only two were published in his lifetime. Most of the other stories remained unpublished because of their overtly homosexual themes; instead they were shown to an appreciative circle of friends and fellow writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, and T. E. Lawrence.The stories differ widely in mood and setting. One is a cheerful political satire; another has, most unusually for Forster, a historical setting; others give serious and powerful expression to some of Forster's profoundest concerns.

"The most interesting and portentous biological experiment of the 20th century authoritatively described by one of the three principal executants." -Sir Peter Medawar"The education of the transforming principle, i.s., genes, as DNA ranks with the contributions of Darwin and Mendel. Here is the chronicle of that revolutionary advance in biology told in eloquently humble fashion by one of the insiders . . . . This work gives another glimpse into the daily joys and frustrations of the scientific life, a story rarely told with such directness and candor." -Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D., president, Rockefeller University"Maclyn McCarty's The Transforming Principle is an elegantly written story of the discovery that DNA is hereditary material-perhaps the most important discovery in biology of the twentieth century. Also, it is the story of the scientists and the science which represents compelling reading for all science watchers." -Paul A. Marks, M.D., president, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Here is a wonderfully imagined picture of a little known period in American musical history. In 1892, at the height of his prodigious powers, Antonin Dvorak was persuaded to leave his native Bohemia to come to New York to be director of the National Conservatory for Music. In this exuberant novel, Josef Skvorecky tells the story of Dvorak's utterly requited love affair with young America, the anthem of which is his famous Symphony in E Minor, "From the New World."

In March 1985, without the usual long delay and speculation, Mikhail Gorbachev, at fifty-four years of age, became the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin. Gorbachev belongs to a new generation of Communist leaders, a generation that did not experience the suffering and fear that Gorbachev's predecessors did who came to power under Stalin. He is a product of the system, not one of its creators. Within a year his vigorous style had made him a well-known political figure throughout the world. In this book, Zhores A. Medvedev, author of an acclaimed biography of Yuri Andropov and many other books on Soviet history, looks at the inner workings of Soviet leadership and at Gorbachev the man and his rise to power. For the paperback edition, Mr. Medvedev has provided a new chapter on recent events, including the Chernobyl disaster: its long-range effects and what is revealed about Gorbachev's leadership and Soviet decision making.

Of all the work bequeathed by to us by that generation of young men who fought in the trenches, Owen's is the most remarkable for its breadth of sympathy and its understanding of human suffering and tenderness, at home and on the battlefield.This new, authoritative edition, indispensable to student and general reader alike, contains the texts of 103 poems and twelve fragments, among them thirty-three poems not previously published or otherwise available in paperback edition. Many of the most famous have important new readings; illuminating notes and a detailed biographical table are also included.

This novel, first published in 1946, is one of May Sarton's earliest and, some critics think, one of her best. It takes place during the years between the world wars and explores the life of a Belgian family, the Duchesnes, and their mutual devotion which intensifies under the shadow of impending disaster.Mélanie Duchesne, mother of three, is an active businesswoman, whose courage, energy, and optimism bind the family and its farm together. Paul, her husband, is a philosopher, detached, moody, continually embroiled in the spiritual conflicts of a crumbling Europe.The last years before the second war are tense ones, a time for stock-taking, for a quickening of the pace of life. But it is Mélanie who encourages her family to proceed with their plans, to continue with their way of life. And it is Mélanie who decides their future as the Germans launch their invasion of Belgium.

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a writer and disciple of Freud who became a practicing analyst. For over two decades she and Freud kept up an intensive correspondence. Freud found in her a perceptive appreciater and amplifier of his ideas, and Frau Andreas found him a sympathetic critic of her own. Their exchanges on theoretical topics and clinical experiences, their admiring friendship, and the glimpses of their personalities make this collection invaluable for readers interested in the history of psychoanalysis. The book includes an introduction and notes by Ernst Pfeiffer, Lou Andreas-Salomé's literary executor.

For more than a guide for bringing birds to the feeder, this book-published here for the first time in paperback-is a sound, useful tool, as essential for anyone with a serious interest in birds as a pair of binoculars.Among the eminently useful treasures to be found in the New Handbook are complete plans for building birdhouses and feeders for numerous species, including martins, bluebirds, tree swallows, woodpeckers, and others; a listing of plants attractive to birds; landscaping plans designed to attract birds and help them thrive, instructions on how to attract such favorites as hummingbirds, game birds, and waterfowl; and bird-attracting strategies for the small garden, farm, or estate. Additional sections describe serious bird-study techniques, care of injured birds, and even the organization of bird sanctuaries.This book is an essential guide not only for those interested in observing birds, but for anyone who desires to foster birds' welfare in an ever more threatened ecosystem.

Psychoanalysis is certainly one of the most contested areas of debate within feminism. This book presents articles on feminine sexuality by Lacan and members of the école freudienne, the school of psychoanalysis that Lacan directed in Paris from 1964 to 1980.The question of feminine sexuality has divided the psychoanalytic movement since the 1920s. Despite their opposition to each other, contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism both reject Freud's phallocentrism. This book forcefully reasserts the importance of the castration complex in Freud's work and of the phallus in the work of Lacan, offering them not as a reflection of a theory based on male supremacy and privilege but as the terms through which any such privilege is exposed as a fraud. Lacan's rereading of Freud is seen here to reveal, in a way that no other account has been able to do, the arbitrary and fictional nature of both male and female sexual identity and, specifically, the fantasy behind the category "woman" as the dominant fetish of our culture. These texts reveal that women constantly exceed the barriers of the definition to which they are confined.

In this non-partisan text, Arturo Morales Carrión discusses the island's social, institutional, and cultural evolution and provides a historical perspective on all political positions.Attention to problems related to the Puerto Rican search for identity makes this a book of special interest to Americans and Puerto Ricans alike. "Understanding the island," says the author, "involves transcending the confines of American nationalism in an effort at empathy and insight. Only through mutual understanding and respect will the United States and Puerto Rico face with hope and creativity the many baffling and thorny issues of the present."

Presenting the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1981 to Ammons's A Coast of Trees Richard Locke, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, said, in part: "In the thirty years since A. R. Ammons published his first poems, he has fashioned a body of work that achieves a rare amplitude, specific gravity, and high seriousness. He is a poet of the American Sublime-a nature poet, as we say-standing in the tradition of Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman. Amidst the hue and cry of contemporary poetical factions, his work pursues its own integrity: clear, unblinking in its self-knowledge, remarkable for its radiant density of argument and feeling."

The turbulent history of Germany up to World War II has its roots in a thousand years, from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 A. D. to hegemony and subsequent foundation of medieval Germany, to the rise of Prussian power under Bismarck. Goeffrey Barraclough's classic work of historiography deals with this complex millennium with unmatched authority and depth of knowledge.

Several books have been written on the crash itself but non before has dealt with events leading up to it.The era of the 1920s was one of economic growth, and not merely tinsel and ballyhoo. For most of the period, stock market prices were not unreasonably high and investment capitalism matured and took on its present-day power. It was Wall Street's silver age.It was also and age of time purchases and of buying stocks on margin; an age when both practices were abused, but when Wall Street was no worse than Main Street. It was a period when government would not take major steps to correct the abuses and excesses. The few decisions made by the Federal Reserve were neither timely nor wise. A head of steam was building up for which there was no safety valve.When the great crash came it was not directly followed by an economic collapse. During the next year, government and business did nothing of importance to prevent the depression, whose severity could not be attributed to Wall Street.

This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced dangerous ideas about the nature and meaning of existence and helped shape the modern world.

A loosely connected collection of essays with an emphasis on cross-cultural analysis and on religious and moral standards for development.

The purpose of this book is to show how children use their traditional lore to cope with the stresses of their lives and to learn what it means to be a member of a human society. The subjects' ages ranged from grade-school children through college freshman, located in forty-three states, the Virgin Islands, the Canal Zone, and American military bases abroad. The materials in this collection were drawn from a random sample.

No king, no captain ever stood with better. Roland looks up on the mountains and slopes, sees the French dead, so many good men fallen, and weeps for them, as a great warrior weeps: "Barons, my lords, may God give you his grace, may he grant Paradise to all your souls, make them lie down among the holy flowers. I never saw better vassals than you. All the years you've served me, and all the times, the mighty lands you conquered for Charles our King! The Emperor raised you for this terrible hour! Land of France, how sweet you are, native land, laid waste this day, ravaged, made a desert. Barons of France, I see you die for me, and I, your lord-I cannot protect you. May God come to your aid, that God who never failed. -Excerpt from The Song of Roland

This book is a pictorial record of Dr. King's leadership in the nonviolent movement for racial equality and human dignity from the boycott of segregated busing in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 until his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. The commentary accompanying the photographs includes a chronology of Dr. King's career and the texts of his major addresses.

The term classic yachts invokes many images: long bow sprits, impeccable sheer lines and tiny transoms, teak decks, varnished trim, and sparkling brass. Some of the great sailboats come to mind: Altair, Lelantina, So Fong, and Ticonderoga, to name a few. But there are also the motor yachts such as Principia or the classic J boats Shamrock V and Endeavour. Some feel that classic yachts have to be at least fifty years old and built of wood, and while In the Spirit of Tradition is primarily about old wooden boats, there are some new yachts as well, such as Hetairos and Radiance, true to the "classic" style.Fifty yachts are shown with historical and current photographs and textual information. Additionally, there are profiles of the people today who love and restore classic yachts. This lush, beautiful book is the most complete, up-to-date book on classic yachts ever produced.

With canny insight and bone-dry wit, John Alcock, a specialist in the ecology of the American Southwest, introduces us to the lives and loves of desert insects as they forage through his backyard oasis. Creating his own desert garden behind his suburban home in Tempe, Arizona, Alcock scrutinizes every square inch of soil detailing the exotic plant life he finds and offering tips on its peccadilloes and preservation.The true heroes of this story, however, are the bugs of Alcock's backyard. We are drawn into complex plots almost biblical in nature of life and love, survival and death. Two male earwigs caught in each other's pincers battle for a prized female. A female mantis finishes copulating, beheads her mate, and cannibalizes his body for its precious protein.With each detail, Alcock pieces together the entire ecosystem of his desert paradise. Always amusing and instructive, and sometimes dramatic, In a Desert Garden provides an eye-opening meditation on the joys of planting, weeding, pruning, and, most of all, bug-hunting.