Author: Jan Zalasiewicz File Type: epub Rocks, more than anything else, underpin our lives. They make up the solid structure of the Earth and of other rocky planets, and are present at the cores of gas giant planets. We live on the rocky surface of the planet, grow our food on weathered debris derived from rocks, and we obtain nearly all of the raw materials with which we found our civilization from rocks. From the Earths crust to building bricks, rocks contain our sense of planetary history, and are a guide to our future. In this Very Short Introduction Jan Zalsiewicz looks at the nature and variety of rocks, and the processes by which they are formed. Starting from the origin of rocks and their key role in the formation of the Earth, he considers what we know about the deep rocks of the mantle and core, and what rocks can tell us about the evolution of the Earth, and looks at those found in outer space and on other planets. ABOUT THE SERIES The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Author: Kenneth D. Gariepy File Type: pdf In this unique study, emerging higher education leader and policy expert Kenneth D. Gariepy takes a Foucauldian genealogical approach to the study of the intellectually free subject through the analysis of selected academic freedom statement-events. Assuming academic freedom to be an institutionalized discourse-practice operating in the field of contemporary postsecondary education in Canada, a specific kind of cross-disciplinary, historico-theoretical research is conducted that pays particular attention to the productive nature and effects of power-knowledge. The intent is to disrupt academic freedom as commonsensical good and universal right in order to instead focus on how it is that the academic subject emerges as freeunfree to think - and therefore freeunfree to be - through particular, effective, and effecting regimes of truth and strategies of objectification and subjectification. In this way, the author suggests how it is that academic freedom operates as a set of systemically agonistic practices that might only realize a different economy of discourse through the contingent nature of the very social power that produces it. Dr. Gariepys use of Foucaults genealogical analysis provides a wholly different way in which to re-think the construction and practice of academic freedom in Canada and is thus an important contribution to the broader discursive field it seeks to analyze. Given contemporary neoliberal critiques of the university, the issue of academic freedom and the intellectually free subject is a vital problem that is of interest to numerous knowledge producing communities - on and off campus. Equally important in addressing the problem of academic freedom is how the book also contributes a new description of the genealogical method - something Foucault did not stipulate - that is original, ambitious, compelling, and insightful. I commend Dr. Gariepy for returning, to investigate anew, an issue we think we know. - E. Lisa Panayotidis, PhD, Professor & Chair, Educational Studies in Curriculum and Learning, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Editor of History of Intellectual Culture **

Author: Brian A. Catlos File Type: epub A magisterial, myth-dispelling history of Islamic Spain spanning the millennium between the founding of Islam in the seventh century and the final expulsion of Spains Muslims in the seventeenthIn Kingdoms of Faith, award-winning historian Brian A. Catlos rewrites the history of Islamic Spain from the ground up, evoking the cultural splendor of al-Andalus, while offering an authoritative new interpretation of the forces that shaped it.Prior accounts have portrayed Islamic Spain as a paradise of enlightened tolerance or the site where civilizations clashed. Catlos taps a wide array of primary sources to paint a more complex portrait, showing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews together built a sophisticated civilization that transformed the Western world, even as they waged relentless war against each other and their coreligionists. Religion was often the language of conflict, but seldom its cause--a lesson we would do well to learn in our own time.**

Author: Brian Arkins File Type: epub This book presents an analysis of more than 30 plays written by Irish dramatists and poets that are based on the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. These plays proceed from the time of Yeats and Synge through MacNeice and the Longfords on to many of todays leading writers. A special feature of the book is that to cater for those who may know little about Greek tragedy, it begins with a chapter entitled A Brief Reading of Greek Tragedy, and then regarding to each Greek play analyzed, it presents a short essay about that play, before addressing the Irish reinterpretation.