We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. We would like to see everything established, proven, laid bare. The more important an issue, the more we desire to see it clarified, stripped of all secrets, all shades of gray. What could be more important than to understand the Universe and ourselves as a part of it? To find a window onto our origin and our destiny? This book examines how far our modern cosmological theories - with their sometimes audacious models, such as inflation, cyclic histories, quantum creation, parallel universes -...
We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. We would like to see everything established, pr...
Since the beginning, firemen have been competing with each other for the honor of being first to a fire. In New York State, firematic contests between "drill teams" of volunteer firefighters have reached a level of competition that is unique in the entire world; there is nowhere else in terms of speed. technique or sophistication that even comes close. Chariots of Firefighters chronicles the growth of these contests, from foot races and fistfights between neighboring fire companies in New York City to the formation of the New York State Volunteer Firemen's Parade and Drill Team Captain's...
Since the beginning, firemen have been competing with each other for the honor of being first to a fire. In New York State, firematic contests between...
Poetry. Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles' shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.
Poetry. Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles' shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's m...
