At one time the American Dream was the ideal and envy of the world. But today, at the dawn of the new Millennium, Europe is pointing a new way to the future. In this major new book, best-selling author Jeremy Rifkin argues that Europe has a vision of its own and is overtaking America as the world's next superpower. The American Dream was based on economic growth, personal wealth and independence. It was synonymous with love of country and patriotism, frontier mentality and the unbridled exercise of power. Yet what were once considered prime virtues - cherished and idealised not only in America but throughout the world - are increasingly seen by many as drawbacks and even impediments. But while the American Dream tires and languishes in the past, a new European Dream is being born. Today we see a new set of values emerging which are focused on sustainable development, quality of life and multilateralism. More cosmopolitan and less concerned with the brute exercise of power, the European Dream is better positioned to accommodate the many forces that are propelling us into a more interconnected and interdependent world. Where does Britain fit into this story? The British find themselves betwixt and between a fading American Dream and a newly emerging European Dream which is gaining the upper hand in our contemporary global age. Rifkin argues that Britain is uniquely positioned to play a bridge role between Europe and America and has the potential to help create a synergy between the two superpowers of the 21st century. But in order to exercise any real influence in world affairs, Britain must choose to be part of a larger political entity. In a globally connected world, no people can exist any longer as an island unto themselves. The only question for Britain is whether it will make its home with America or with Europe.

The conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in 368 AD brought a transformation to Christianity and to western civilization, the effects of which we still feel today. Previously, the Roman empire had absorbed and sustained the Greek intellectual tradition which, in the astronomy of Ptolemy, the medicine of Galen and the philosophy of Plotinus, reached new heights. Constantine turned Rome from the relatively open, tolerant and pluralistic civilisation of the Hellenistic world, towards a culture that was based on the rule of fixed authority. The century after Constantine's conversion saw the development of an alliance between church and state which stifled freedom of thought and the tradition of Greek rationalism which was intrinsic to it. The churches enjoyed enormous patronage and exemptions from tax, and in return allowed the emperors to take on the definition and enforcement of an increasingly narrow religious orthodoxy.

This book explores how the European mind was closed by the revolution of the fourth century. It looks at the rise of the 'divine' monarch, the struggle as Christianity painfully separated itself from Judaism, the conflict between faith and reason, and the problems in finding any kind of rational basis for Christian theology. In these centuries, a turning-point for Western civilisation, we see the development of Christian anti-Semitism, the origins of the opposition of religion and science and the roots of Christianity's discomfort with sex, issues which haunt the Christian churches to this day.

The Closing of the Western Mind is a major work of history. Wide-ranging and ambitious, its central theme is the relationship between the two wellsprings of our civilisation, the Judaeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman, and how the tensions between them have created the culture in which we continue to live, think and believe.

Richard D. Duke, one of the founding fathers of the gaming discipline, once said: It works: that's all we have.' He is now one of the authors of this book that sets out to answer the questions: Why do games work and what is the active substance that makes them do what they do?

The three Dutch editors took the initiative and invited professionals and scientists from different fields, from different disciplines, and from all over the world to contribute their answers to this intriguing question. The book presents a state-of-the-art overview that will help us to understand simulation games. It contains contributions from theory, applications and practice. The set of applications covers psychodrama, culture, change, learning, narratives, military, communication, homo ludens, management and many more areas.

This book contains many contributions from professional gamers who share their insights concerning the active substance of simulation games. Therefore, it is of value to everyone who wants to understand why simulation games really work.

Alhoewel veel bedrijven en organisaties gebruik maken van het systeem van een Denktank, is er volgens de auteur opmerkelijk weinig literatuur over dit onderwerp voorhanden. Zijn boek wil in deze leemte voorzien en is bedoeld als een gereedschapskist voor het creatief en collectief oplossen van problemen. Collectief denken en creativiteit dienen individueel en logisch denken te vervangen wil onze cultuur op termijn overleven.

Een Denktank, als een soort multi-brein organisme, is bij uitstek het middel om organisaties slagvaardiger en wendbaarder te maken. De auteur is als hoogleraar verbonden aan de faculteit Toegepaste Economische Wetenschappen van het Limburg University Centre en gespecialiseerd in probleemoplossing en collectief creatief denken.

In 2008 organiseerde het Drents Museum, Assen een spectaculaire tentoonstelling over het oude terracotta leger van Xi'an, een van de grootste archeologische vondsten ooit.  Het terracotta leger beschermde de tombe van de eerste keizer van China, Qin Shi Huang Di. Ook na hem lieten overleden keizers zich begeleiden door hun eigen terracotta leger en andere prachtige voorwerpen. Dit kleurrijke boek dat bij de tentoonstelling verschijnt, toont de verfijnde soldaten, ruiters en paarden samen met andere fraaie grafgiften van terracotta, jade, goud en brons. Al deze voorwerpen geven inzicht in hoe tijdens de Qin en West-Han dynastie over het leven in het hiernamaals werd gedacht.

Now in its 23rd year, with completely new entries for each annual edition, Miller's Antiques Price Guide is the world's best-selling antiques guide and contains 10.000 new photographs of antiques, already sold or on sale in the last year in all areas of the trade. All the main collectiong areas such as furniture, glass, ceramics, metalware and silver are covered as well as special features including a celebration of the 250th anniversary of Berlin porcelain, plus Tunbridgeware, posters and textile.

In this book Jane Pettigrew will redress the balance, using the research that she has carried out over the years, and drawing on the incomparable resource of the National Trust's collections and archives. She will delve into many subject areas -- tea gowns, tea dances and social etiquette, for instance -- to satisfy an enthusiastic international audience, waiting, thirsty, for more knowledge.

Vergeleken bij alle aandacht voor koken en eten steekt die voor spijsvertering en poepen schril af. Net alsof al wat naar binnen gaat er nooit meer uit komt. Poep bevindt zich in het verdomhoekje waar eerder de seks huisde. Grootste obstakel bij praten over poep is net als toen bij seks de taal: buiten het vulgaire en medische is er weinig jargon. Maar net zoals seks naast voortplanting vooral het genot dient, is ook de ontlasting een bron van voldoening. Poep is een prachtig, veelzijdig onderwerp dat zowel vanuit de biologie, de geschiedenis, de kunst, het milieu benaderd kan worden. Het vergt alleen wel de blik van Midas Dekkers, die als geen ander in staat is om van het onwaarschijnlijkste materiaal (dood en vergankelijkheid, rood haar, bestialiteit) boeken te maken die aan het denken zetten, en aan het lachen maken. 'De kleine verlossing' is een uniek boek over een zeer alledaags onderwerp: `Met de stoelgang is onze taak volbracht'.

Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body. As compulsively readable as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best, a must-read owner's manual for everybody. Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body--how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Bryson-esque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you, in particular. As Bill Bryson writes, 'we pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.' The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information.

Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Lois Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cezanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In THE MIRROR AND THE PALETTE, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery. This is a dazzlingly original and ambitious book by one of the most well-respected art critics at work today.

Opstellen en interviews over hoogbouw.

A true genius whose talents embraced painting, engineering, anatomy, and flight, Leonardo da Vinci was--and remains--an extraordinary human being, indeed one of the most intriguing figures in world history, as the recent success of The Da Vinci Code attests. Now, in this new biography, Martin Kemp explores the essential nature of this forever fascinating artist-engineer, both as an individual and as a historical phenomenon.
How can we best understand Leonardo? How did his mind work--was he prolific but scattered in his thinking, or is there a method in what often seems to be his madness? Was he basically an artist who also pursued science and technology, or was "science"--his understanding of the physical world--central to his artistic vision? In Leonardo, Martin Kemp offers a vivid portrait of the Renaissance giant that answers these questions and more. The book takes us on an absorbing journey through the life and work of Leonardo, looking first at the historical man, portraying an impressive and cultivated figure, an artist who in truth completed few paintings, rarely satisfied a commission, and yet lived in style and ended his career with a massive salary. More important, the author examines the ideas underlying Leonardo's investigations of nature, illuminating his vision of the artist-engineer as matching nature itself in his creativity. Kemp argues that Leonardo's apparent diversities reveal a desire to find an inner unity in the functioning of everything in the observable world. For Leonardo, writes Kemp, every act of looking and drawing was an act of analysis, and he used these analyses to re-make and re-interpret his surroundings. In a final chapter, Kemp also comments on the Da Vinci Code and "the continuing public appetite for Leonardo and his doings."
Beautifully illustrated with a unique "thumbnail museum" that offers a tour of all Leonardo's paintings, plus 30 additional illustrations and life-size reproductions of pages from his famous notebooks, Leonardo is a powerful portrait of one of the towering geniuses of world history.

In De Triple A-econoom betoogt Marcel Canoy dat het denken over de huidige crisis is vastgelopen in een onvruchtbare tweestrijd tussen cijferfetisjisten en cynici. De cijferfetisjisten reduceren economie tot getallen en modellen. Ze worden gehekeld door de cynici, die de bevindingen van de economische wetenschap wegzetten als wereldvreemde abstracties. Canoy introduceert in zijn boek de Triple-A econoom, die met hulp van Aristoteles, Thomas van Aquino en Adam Smith het gedachtegoed van economen in een bredere maatschappelijke context plaatst en oplossingsgericht is. Elk hoofdstuk in het boek wordt ingeleid door een dialoog tussen een uil en een vos. Bekijk hieronder de audiovisuele bewerking van twee dialogen op YouTube. Vos & Uil en de Triple-A dieren Vos & Uil over banken

Persoonlijke familiegeschiedenis van de Britse historicus Mazower; de levens van veel van zijn familieleden werden getekend door de Russische revolutie en de Shoah.

Bestaat er een verband tussen ras en IQ? Welk ras is het beste? Deze vragen zijn allerminst gedateerd. De rassentheorie beleeft een zorgwekkende comeback, in wetenschap en in politiek. Angela Saini onderzoekt in Superieur pseudowetenschappelijke beweringen en theorieën over ras, en toont aan waarom ze onhoudbaar zijn.Superieur is een broodnodig onderzoek naar de verraderlijke geschiedenis en consequenties van de rassentheorie. Dit boek geeft onweerlegbare argumenten om die theorie en racisme te bestrijden.

"Classical architecture is a visual 'language' and like any other language has its own grammatical rules. Classical buildings as widely spaced in time as a Roman temple, an Italian Renaissance palace and a Regency house all show an awareness of these rules even if they vary them, break them or poetically contradict them. Sir Christopher Wren described them as the 'Latin' of architecture and the analogy is almost exact. There is the difference, however, that whereas the learning of Latin is a slow and difficult business, the language of classical architecture is relatively simple. It is still, to a great extent, the mode of expression of our urban surroundings, since classical architecture was the common language of the western world till comparatively recent times. Anybody to whom architecture makes a strong appeal has probably already discovered something of its grammar for himself. In this book, the author's purpose is to set out as simply and vividly as possible the exact grammatical workings of this architectural language. He is less concerned with its development in Greece and Rome than with its expansion and use in the centuries since the Renaissance. He explains the vigorous discipline of 'the orders' and the scope of 'rustication'; the dramatic deviations of the Baroque and, in the last chapter, the relationship between the classical tradition and the 'modern' architecture of today. The book is intended for anybody who cares for architecture but more specifically for students beginning a course in the history of architecture, to whom a guide to the classical rules will be an essential companion."--Publisher description.

A three-thousand year history of the world that examines the causes of war and the search for peace

In three thousand years of history, China has spent at least eleven centuries at war. The Roman Empire was in conflict during at least 50 per cent of its lifetime. Since 1776, the United States has spent over one hundred years at war. The dream of peace has been universal in the history of humanity. So why have we so rarely been able to achieve it?

In A Political History of the World, Jonathan Holslag has produced a sweeping history of the world, from the Iron Age to the present, that investigates the causes of conflict between empires, nations and peoples and the attempts at diplomacy and cosmopolitanism. A birds-eye view of three thousand years of history, the book illuminates the forces shaping world politics from Ancient Egypt to the Han Dynasty, the Pax Romana to the rise of Islam, the Peace of Westphalia to the creation of the United Nations.

This truly global approach enables Holslag to search for patterns across different eras and regions, and explore larger questions about war, diplomacy, and power. Has trade fostered peace? What are the limits of diplomacy? How does environmental change affect stability? Is war a universal sin of power? At a time when the threat of nuclear war looms again, this is a much-needed history intended for students of international politics, and anyone looking for a background on current events.

Het Overijssels Havezatenpad voert dwars door de provincie Overijssel. Lange-afstand-wandelpad 12, Oldenzaal-Steenwijk 272 km. Plus weekendwandeling Land van Vollenhove 27 km 

VINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

How do we choose between what is fair and just, and what our debtors demand of us? Yanis Varoufakis was put in such a dilemma in 2015 when he became the finance minister of Greece. In this rousing book, he charts the absurdities that underpin calls for austerity, as well as his own battles with a bureaucracy bent on ignoring the human cost of its every action. Passionately outspoken and tuned to the voices of the oppressed, Varoufakis presents a guide to modern economics, and its threat to democracy, like no other.

Selected from the books And the Weak Suffer What They Must? and Adults in the Room

A New York Times Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year
A New Statesman Book to Read

From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class

Deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are rising dramatically in the United States, claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives. Anne Case and Angus Deaton explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. This critically important book paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline, and provides solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.

Andreas Petzold examines medieval European art in the broader context of its relationship to the art of Byzantium and Islam, tracing the influences among these cultures through trade and the Crusades. He views Romanesque art in terms of the social structures that organized the medieval world - church, princely court, peasant society - discovering on the way the important role of women as artists and patrons, the complex relationships among religious and secular institutions, and the ways that sculpture, architecture, painting, and other art forms developed in style and technique to express a world no longer Classical but not yet Gothic.

A Nobel Prize–winning economist tells the remarkable story of how the world has grown healthier, wealthier, but also more unequal over the past two and half centuries

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton—one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty—tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world. Deaton takes an in-depth look at the historical and ongoing patterns behind the health and wealth of nations, and addresses what needs to be done to help those left behind.

Deaton describes vast innovations and wrenching setbacks: the successes of antibiotics, pest control, vaccinations, and clean water on the one hand, and disastrous famines and the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the other. He examines the United States, a nation that has prospered but is today experiencing slower growth and increasing inequality. He also considers how economic growth in India and China has improved the lives of more than a billion people. Deaton argues that international aid has been ineffective and even harmful. He suggests alternative efforts—including reforming incentives to drug companies and lifting trade restrictions—that will allow the developing world to bring about its own Great Escape.

Demonstrating how changes in health and living standards have transformed our lives, The Great Escape is a powerful guide to addressing the well-being of all nations.