Vodka: How a Colorless, Odorless, Flavorless Spirit Conquered America
Author: Victorino Matus File Type: epub It began as poisonous rotgut in Medieval RussiaIvan the Terrible liked it, Peter the Great loved itbut this grain alcohol without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color has become our uncontested king of spirits. Over a thousand brands fight for market share, shelved in glass skulls, Tommy guns, bulletproof bottles flavored with pears, currants, chipotle or quintuple distilled by Donald Trump. But it wasnt always thus. For 200 years, America drank the brown stuff, which gave us Colonial rumrunners, the Whiskey Rebellion, and Bourbon County, Kentucky. So how did Russias little water, originally a medieval rotgut medicine, unseat Americas favorite hooch? Vic Matus takes us on an incredible visual journey from vodkas humble American origins in a Depression-era Connecticut factoryusing the family recipe from a poor Russian exile in France named Vladimir Smirnovthrough its rise to glamour and fame at the hands of James Bond and the 1990s boom enshrined in Sex and the Citys Grey Goose Cosmos to todays craft distillery movement, which approaches the drink as an art form. Youll see in clear, intoxicating detail how hippie culture, womens lib, and an absolutely ingenious Swedish company all played their part, transforming the booze into a status symbol. By 1975, the war had ended Vodka officially became our favorite spirit. Today, a third of all cocktails ordered contain it. Last year $20 billion in sales poured in from more than 140 million gallons of the stuff. Here is the crisply distilled, bracing story of how risk-taking entrepreneurs defied the odds and turned medieval medicine into a multibillion-dollar industry. **
Author: Timothy Morton
File Type: pdf
Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjectsentities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action. **
Author: Xiaoping Lin
File Type: pdf
Children of Marx and Coca-Cola affords a deep study of Chinese avant-garde art and independent cinema from the mid-1990s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Informed by the authors experience in Beijing and New Yorkglobal cities with extensive access to an emergent transnational Chinese visual culturethis work situates selected artworks and films in the context of Chinese nationalism and post-socialism and against the background of the capitalist globalization that has so radically affected contemporary China. It juxtaposes and compares artists and independent filmmakers from a number of intertwined perspectives, particularly in their shared avant-garde postures and perceptions.Xiaoping Lin provides illuminating close readings of a variety of visual texts and artistic practices, including installation, performance, painting, photography, video, and film. Throughout he sustains a theoretical discussion of representative artworks and films and succeeds in delineating a variegated postsocialist cultural landscape saturated by market forces, confused values, and lost faith. This refreshing approach is due to Lins ability to tackle both Chinese art and cinema rigorously within a shared discursive space. He, for example, aptly conceptualizes a central thematic concern in both genres as postsocialist trauma aggravated by capitalist globalization. By thus focusing exclusively on the two parallel and often intersecting movements or phenomena in the visual arts, his work brings about a fruitful dialogue between the narrow field of traditional art history and visual studies more generally.Children of Marx and Coca-Cola will be a major contribution to China studies, art history, film studies, and cultural studies. Multiple audiencesspecialists, teachers, and students in these disciplines, as well as general readers with an interest in contemporary Chinese society and culturewill find that this work fulfills an urgent need for sophisticated analysis of Chinas cultural production as it assumes a key role in capitalist globalization. **
Author: Cees Pols
File Type: epub
Aan het rauwe leven in de Biesbosch rond 1900 ontkomt ook Janus niet. Er valt niets te kiezen griendwerker zal hij worden. De hele week van huis, slapen in de schrankkeet op de plaat, kloven in zijn handen, zo zal zijn leven eruitzien. Zijn griendwerkerskist is het enige wat hij echt voor zichzelf heeft. De Biesbosch wordt zijn thuis, de stilte zijn muziek.Aanvankelijk is Janus vol goede moed. Hij wil een goede griendwerker zijn. Hij zal laten zien dat ze op hem kunnen vertrouwen. Maar al gauw begint de wereld om hem heen te wankelen. Zonder dat hij er iets aan kan veranderen komt Janus langzaam maar zeker in een isolement terecht.Een onthutsende roman die in sobere maar doeltreffende taal het dramatische leven van een negentiende-eeuwse griendwerker invoelbaar maakt.Cees Pols (1953) schreef eerder Bewaarder gevangen en Witter dan sneeuw. In 2010 schreef hij het actieboek voor de Week van het Christelijke Boek, De tijd dat je zweeft.Recencie(s) Fraai geschreven roman vol dramatische momenten. De auteur heeft zich goed georienteerd in de geschiedenis van De Biesbosch, dat gapend gat met brak water, ontstaan na de St. Elizabethsvloed van 1421. Rond 1900 is dat immense waterbekken het deels ontoegankelijk decor van griendwerkers en kooikers. Ze leven in twee gescheiden werelden in hetzelfde territorium naast elkaar. Binnen een gezin met het kind en de man Janus als hoofdfiguur vervlecht de auteur, in afwisselende perioden van twintig jaar, het armoedige gezinsleven en het altijd dreigende water, dat hun een schamel inkomen oplevert. De hoofdpersoon ontdekt tot zijn verbijstering dat zijn oudere zus zijn moeder is, en dat zijn toegewijde pa niet zijn vader is. Die vervlechting betreft ook een mislukt huwelijk tussen de dochter van de griendwerker en een kooiker. Drank en geweld leiden tot een verdrinking. Als sfeertekening met Bijbelse citaten is er de herkenning van een eenzaam en geknecht leven, waar schuldgevoel een rol speelt. Een indrukwekkend boek. Paperback kleine druk.Dr. Theo Hoogbergen (source Bol.com)
Author: Allan V. Horwitz
File Type: pdf
Depression has become the single most commonly treated mental disorder, amid claims that one out of ten Americans suffer from this disorder every year and 25% succumb at some point in their lives. Warnings that depressive disorder is a leading cause of worldwide disability have been accompanied by a massive upsurge in the consumption of antidepressant medication, widespread screening for depression in clinics and schools, and a push to diagnose depression early, on the basis of just a few symptoms, in order to prevent more severe conditions from developing. In The Loss of Sadness, Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield argue that, while depressive disorder certainly exists and can be a devastating condition warranting medical attention, the apparent epidemic in fact reflects the way the psychiatric profession has understood and reclassified normal human sadness as largely an abnormal experience. With the 1980 publication of the landmark third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), mental health professionals began diagnosing depression based on symptoms--such as depressed mood, loss of appetite, and fatigue--that lasted for at least two weeks. This system is fundamentally flawed, the authors maintain, because it fails to take into account the context in which the symptoms occur. They stress the importance of distinguishing between abnormal reactions due to internal dysfunction and normal sadness brought on by external circumstances. Under the current DSM classification system, however, this distinction is impossible to make, so the expected emotional distress caused by upsetting events-for example, the loss of a job or the end of a relationship- could lead to a mistaken diagnosis of depressive disorder. Indeed, it is this very mistake that lies at the root of the presumed epidemic of major depression in our midst. In telling the story behind this phenomenon, the authors draw on the 2,500-year history of writing about depression, including studies in both the medical and social sciences, to demonstrate why the DSMs diagnosis is so flawed. They also explore why it has achieved almost unshakable currency despite its limitations. Framed within an evolutionary account of human health and disease, The Loss of Sadness presents a fascinating dissection of depression as both a normal and disordered human emotion and a sweeping critique of current psychiatric diagnostic practices. The result is a potent challenge to the diagnostic revolution that began almost thirty years ago in psychiatry and a provocative analysis of one of the most significant mental health issues today.**
Author: Mikhail Elizarov
File Type: epub
If Ryu Murakami had written War and PeaceAs the introduction to this book will tell you, the books by Gromov, obscure and long forgotten propaganda author of the Soviet era, have such an effect on their readers that they suddenly enjoy supernatural powers. Understandably, their readers need to keep accessing these books at all cost and gather into groups around book-bearers, or, as theyre called, librarians. Alexei, until now a loser, comes to collect an uncles inheritance and unexpectedly becomes a librarian. He tells his extraordinary, unbelievable story.
Author: Rhiannon Noel Welch
File Type: pdf
Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Nazi Germany. For many years, pervading much intellectual and public discourse was the contention that, prior to the great influx of racialized migrants in the mid-1980s, and with the exception of the Fascist period, there simply was no race (racialized others, racist intolerance, etc.) in Italy. Vital Subjects examines cultural production - literature, sociology and public health discourse, and early film - from the years between Unification and the end of the First World War (ca. 1860 and 1920) in order to explore how race and colonialism were integral to modern Italian national culture, rather than a marginal afterthought or a Fascist aberration. Drawing from theorizations of biopolitics - a term coined by political theorists from Michel Foucault to Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and numerous others to address how the life and productivity of the population emerges as a distinctively modern political question - the book repositions discourses of race and colonialism with regard to post-Unification national culture. Vital Subjects reads cultural texts in a biopolitical key, arguing that the tenor of racial discourse was overwhelmingly positive, focusing on making Italians as vital subjects--robust, vigorous, well-nourished, and (re)productive.
Author: Ellen Wohl
File Type: pdf
The ability of beavers to create an abundant habitat for a diverse array of plants and animals has been analyzed time and again. The disappearance of beavers across the northern hemisphere, and what this effects, has yet to be comprehensively studied. Saving the Dammed analyzes the beneficial role of beavers and their dams in the ecosystem of a river, focusing on one beaver meadow in Colorado. In her latest book, Ellen Wohl contextualizes North St. Vrain Creek by discussing the implications of the loss of beavers across much larger areas. Saving the Dammed raises awareness of rivers as ecosystems and the role beavers play in sustaining the ecosystem surrounding rivers by exploring the macrocosm of global river alteration, wetland loss, and the reduction in ecosystem services. The resulting reduction in ecosystem services span things such as flood control, habitat abundance and biodiversity, and nitrate reduction. Allowing readers to follow her as she crawls through seemingly impenetrable spaces with slow and arduous movements, Wohl provides a detailed narrative of beaver meadows.Saving the Dammed takes readers through twelve months at a beaver meadow in Colorados Rocky Mountain National Park, exploring how beavers change river valleys and how the decline in beaver populations has altered river ecosystems. As Wohl analyzes and discusses the role beavers play in the ecosystem of a river, readers get to follow her through tight, seemingly impenetrable, crawl spaces as she uncovers the benefit of dams.
Author: Udo J. Birk
File Type: pdf
This unique book on super-resolution microscopy techniques presents comparative, in-depth analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the individual approaches. It was written for non-experts who need to understand the principles of super-resolution or who wish to use recently commercialized instruments as well as for professionals who plan to realize novel microscopic devices. Explaining the practical requirements in terms of hardware, software and sample preparation, the book offers a wealth of hands-on tips and practical tricks to get a setup running, provides invaluable help and support for successful data acquisition and specific advice in the context of data analysis and visualization. Furthermore, it addresses a wide array of transdisciplinary fields of applications. The author begins by outlining the joint efforts that have led to achieving super-resolution microscopy combining advances in single-molecule photo-physics, fluorophore design and fluorescent labeling, instrument design and software development. The following chapters depict and compare current main standard techniques such as structured illumination microscopy, single-molecule localization, stimulated emission depletion microscopy and multi-scale imaging including light-sheet and expansion microscopy. For each individual approach the experimental setups are introduced, the imaging protocols are provided and the various applications illustrated. The book concludes with a discussion of future challenges addressing issues of routine applications and further commercialization of the available methods. Guiding users in how to make choices for the design of their own experiments from scratch to promising application, this one-stop resource is intended for researchers in the applied sciences, from chemistry to biology and medicine to physics and engineering.