How do nations act in a crisis? This book seeks to answer that question both theoretically and historically. It tests and synthesizes theories of political behavior by comparing them with the historical record. The authors apply theories of bargaining, game theory, information processing, decision-making, and international systems to case histories of sixteen crises that occurred during a seventy-five year period. The result is a revision and integration of diverse concepts and the development of a new empirical theory of international conflict.

Originally published in...

"People like myself, who truly feel at home in several countries, are not strictly at home anywhere," writes Abraham Pais, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, near the beginning of this engrossing chronicle of his life on two continents. The author of an immensely popular biography of Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord, Pais writes engagingly for a general audience. His "tale" describes his period of hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland (he ended the war in a Gestapo prison) and his life in America, particularly at the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,...

When Viscount Castlereagh, leader of the House of Commons and architect of the Grand Alliance, committed suicide in 1822, the coroner's inquest could consider only two legal verdicts: insanity or self-murder. Public outrage greeted his burial in Westminster Abbey; the tradition lingered that a suicide's burial place be at a crossroads, with a stake through the heart to keep the lost soul from wandering. Probing a remarkable variety of sources and individual cases, Barbara Gates shows how attitudes toward suicide changed between Castlereagh's death and the end of the century. By 1900 the...

In this revisionary study of Ezra Pound's poetics, Scott Hamilton exposes the extent of the modernist poet's debt to the French romantic and symbolist traditions. Whereas previous critics have focused on a single influence, Hamilton explores a broad spectrum of French poets, including Thophile Gautier, Tristan Corbire, Jules Laforgue, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Rgnier, Jules Romains, Laurent Tailhade, Paul Verlaine, and Stphane Mallarm. This exploration of Pound's canon demonstrates his logic in borrowing from the French tradition as well as a paradoxical circularity to his poetic...

Formalist criticism of the modern novel has concentrated on its spatial aspects. Patricia Tobin focuses, instead, on the modern novel's temporal structure. She notes that the "genealogical imperative" that dominated the nineteenth-century novel, in which one event gave birth to another, has broken down in the twentieth-century novels she studies. Further, she draws parallels between this collapse of linear narrative and the current challenge to linearity from many other areas of modern thought.

Beginning with Mann's Buddenbrooks as a family chronicle novel that fully embodies...

Known to his contemporaries for his sharpness of mind, strength of purpose, fortitude, and good humor, John de Witt was a brilliant leader whose career ended in a death of horror rarely paralleled in history. Herbert Rowen's biography embraces all aspects of De Witt's political, intellectual, and personal life, including his role as a mathematician admired by Newton, an "unphilosophical Cartesian," and a political thinker.

The author describes De Witt's youth, Dutch society of his day, and his central part in the domestic and foreign politics of the Dutch Republic from 1651 to 1672....

Written 150 years ago, never published, and presumed lost for nearly a century, Wilkie Collins's earliest novel now appears in print for the first time. Iolani is a sensational romance--a tale of terror and suspense, bravery and betrayal, set against the lush backdrop of Tahiti. The book's complicated history is worthy of a writer famous for intricate plots hinging on long-kept secrets. Collins wrote the book as a young man in the early 1840s, twenty years before The Moonstone and The Woman in White made his name among Victorian novelists. He failed to find a publisher for...

From the Outside In examines the profound impact of World War II on American government. The book argues that the wartime and immediate postwar experiences of the 1940s transformed and redirected the policies and government institutions of the New Deal. In a work that makes significant contributions to the study of U.S. politics and history, Bartholomew Sparrow proposes a new model of the state and of "state-building." The author applies this model, which derives from the resource dependence perspective, to the historical record of four areas of public policy: social security,...

In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Meta-morphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as wordplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site...

Aeronautical engineers concerned with the analysis of aircraft dynamics and the synthesis of aircraft flight control systems will find an indispensable tool in this analytical treatment of the subject. Approaching these two fields with the conviction that an understanding of either one can illuminate the other, the authors have summarized selected, interconnected techniques that facilitate a high level of insight into the essence of complex systems problems. These techniques are suitable for establishing nominal system designs, for forecasting off-nominal problems, and for diagnosing the...