Author: Margaret Thatcher File Type: epub A firsthand account of Thatchers term as Britains prime minister discusses her three election victories, the Falklands War, the Miners Strike, the Brighton Bomb, the Westland Affair, and her relations with other nations and leaders. Reprint. $50,000 adpromo. *NYT. ***

Author: Stuart A. Kauffman File Type: pdf How did life start? Is the evolution of life describable by any physics-like laws? Stuart Kauffmans latest book offers an explanation-beyond what the laws of physics can explain-of the progression from a complex chemical environment to molecular reproduction, metabolism and to early protocells, and further evolution to what we recognize as life. Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of becoming in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere. Building on concepts from his work as a complex systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as constraint closure. Living systems are defined by the concept of organization which has not been focused on in enough in previous works. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves they literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating constraints. Living cells are machines that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems-the origin of life problem-was probably a spontaneous phase transition to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. The resulting protocells were capable of Darwins heritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. Evolution propagates this burgeoning organization. Evolving living creatures, by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures can emerge. If life is abundant in the universe, this self-constructing, propagating, exploding diversity takes us beyond physics to biospheres everywhere. **

Author: Meghan K. Roberts File Type: pdf Though the public may retain a hoary image of the lone scientific or philosophical genius generating insights in isolation, scholars discarded it long ago. In reality, the families of scientists and philosophers in the Enlightenment played a substantial role, not only making space for inquiry within the home but also assisting in observing, translating, calculating, and illustrating. Sentimental Savants is the first book to explore the place of the family among the savants of the French Enlightenment, a group that openly embraced their families and domestic lives, even going so far as to test out their ideasfrom education to inoculationon their own children. Meghan K. Roberts delves into the lives and work of such major figures as Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Chatelet, the Marquis de Condorcet, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jerome Lalande to paint a striking portrait of how sentiment and reason interacted in the eighteenth century to produce not only new kinds of knowledge but new kinds of families as well. **

Author: Marilyn Ruth Brown File Type: pdf The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugene Delacroixs painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugos novel Les Miserables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the fathers symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchins psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of -fraternity, - -people, - and -nation.- Within a fundamentally split conception of -the people, - the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation.