In Stefan Zweig's Confusion, a venerable privy councilor approaching the end of his career adds a “secret page” to the public record of his accomplishments, confessing the true story of his youthful initiation into the delights and perils of intense scholarship. After a first semester in Berlin more devoted to amorous adventures with local shop girls than books, he makes a fresh start in a small university town in central Germany where a professor's brilliant lecturing style sparks a new all-consuming passion for learning and reading. He takes lodgings above the apartment of the professor and his wife and is soon a regular visitor there, dining with them on a daily basis and successfully inspiring the older man to make a fresh attempt to complete his magnum opus. And yet the professor's enthusiasm for his devoted protégé alternates with cold scorn and sudden dismissals, leaving the perplexed student crippled by feelings of inadequacy and rejection, feelings only the professor's frustrated young wife seems to understand. But the secret anguish behind the older man's apparently irrational cruelty will not so easily out. . .

Laying bare the fraught relationship between human instincts and higher callings, physical longing and the desire for knowledge, muddled emotions and the quest for intellectual clarity, Zweig's intoxicating novella probes the mysteries of the creative process and the limits of sublimation.

"Il Massaggio Coreano della Mano" è un manuale pratico che permette l'apprendimento di una tecnica di massaggio e agopressura della mano per alleviare autonomamente diversi disturbi comuni, come il raffreddore, alcuni tipi di mal di testa, mal di stomaco, mal di schiena, dolori articolari, giramenti di testa, disturbi dell'area sessuale e molti altri ancora. La mano rappresenta, analogamente al piede nella riflessologia plantare, un microcosmo del corpo umano. Massaggiando o esercitando pressione su particolari punti della mano ("punti di corrispondenza") andiamo a stimolare determinati punti del corpo, contribuendo così ad attenuarne i disturbi. Una disciplina naturale antica, ma nuovissima per l'Italia: di facile apprendimento, che non richiede un ambiente idoneo ed è quindi applicabile ovunque. Nelle prime pagine sono trattati tutti gli aspetti teorici, dopodichè il lettore può dedicarsi all'applicazione pratica sfruttando l'ampio elenco di punti da manipolare per ciascun disturbo specifico.

Legendre, a designer, essayist, and principal of the London-based architectural firm, IJP, examines mathematical and design principals in many different types of pasta. Inspired by the science of phylogeny, Legendre uses morphological features such as edge, surface, cross section, and longitudinal profile to pare the many varieties of pasta down to 92 unique types which he charts in a phylogenetic "Family Tree." He then illustrates each of the 92 types by its parametric equations with a 3D diagram and commissioned photograph by Stefano Graziani. The book concludes with a "Family Reunion": a fold-out bubble diagram in which the extended pasta family are grouped by similarities in shape and texture, and a comprehensive list of commonly-known pastas sorted by type. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Recent trends in the fashion market (including an impressive increase in the number of new collections, product assortments and variants, and the emerging mass-customization model) dictate the need for a new approach. "Transforming Clothing Production into a Demand-Driven, Knowledge-Based, High-Tech Industry" discusses the ramifications of such an approach, which must lead to a drastic shortening of the whole cycle from conception to production and retail, as well as a shift from a labor-intensive to a technology- and knowledge-intensive clothing manufacturing industry. "Transforming Clothing Production into a Demand-Driven, Knowledge-Based, High-Tech Industry" is a collection of short papers from prominent researchers involved with the LEAPFROG (Leadership for European Apparel Production From Research along Original Guidelines) initiative. LEAPFROG proposes a revolutionary industrial paradigm based on research results in scientific-technological fields.

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Franois Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects.

Censored in 1945 and unpublished for sixty years, a collection of dispatches by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist records the first eyewitness observations of the devasted Japanese city of Nagasaki, along with the accounts of Allied prisoners who recalled the dropping of the bomb and their years of torture and captivity in Japanese POW camps. Simultaneous.

To some Western evangelicals, the practices of Eastern Orthodoxy seem mysterious and perhaps even unbiblical. Then again, from an Orthodox perspective, evangelicals lack the spiritual roots provided by centuries-old church traditions. Are the differences between these two branches of Christianity so sharp that to shake hands is to compromise the gospel itself? Or is there room for agreement? Are Eastern Orthodoxy and evangelicalism at all compatible? Yes, no, maybe---this book allows five leading authorities to present their different views, have them critiqued by their fellow authors, and respond to the critiques. Writing from an Orthodox perspective with a strong appreciation for evangelicalism, Bradley Nassif makes a case for compatibility. Michael Horton and Vladimir Berzonsky take the opposite stance from their respective evangelical and Orthodox backgrounds. And George Hancock-Stefan (evangelical) and Edward Rommen (Orthodox) each offer a qualified 'perhaps.' The interactive Counterpoints forum is ideal for comparing and contrasting the different positions to understand the strengths and weaknesses of these two important branches of Christianity and to form a personal conclusion regarding their compatibility. The Counterpoints series provides a forum for comparison and critique of different views on issues important to Christians. Counterpoints books address two categories: Church Life and Bible and Theology. Complete your library with other books in the Counterpoints series.