The Art of Not Being Governed. An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James Scott

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain
stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.

In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Book of the Year, ForeWord Magazine
Fukuoka Asian Academic Prize
John K. Fairbank Book Prize, American Historical Association
Bernard Schwartz Book Award, Asia Society

Paradoxical Life. Meaning, Matter, and the Power of Human Choice by Andreas Wagner

What can a fingernail tell us about the mysteries of creation? In one sense, a nail is merely a hunk of mute matter, yet in another, it’s an information superhighway quite literally at our fingertips. Every moment, streams of molecular signals direct our cells to move, flatten, swell, shrink, divide, or die. Andreas Wagner’s ambitious new book explores this hidden web of unimaginably complex interactions in every living being. In the process, he unveils a host of paradoxes underpinning our
understanding of modern biology, contradictions he considers gatekeepers at the frontiers of knowledge.

Though we tend to think of concepts in such mutually exclusive pairs as mind-matter, self-other, and naturejavascript:void(0)-nurture, Wagner argues that these opposing ideas are not actually separate. Indeed, they are as inextricably connected as the two sides of a coin. Through a tour of modern biological marvels, Wagner illustrates how this paradoxical tension has a profound effect on the way we define the world around us.

Paradoxical Life is thus not only a unique account of modern biology. It ultimately serves a radical—and optimistic—outlook for humans and the world we help create.
Andreas Wagner is a professor in the department of biochemistry at the University of Zurich and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. Educated at Yale University and at the University of Vienna, Wagner focuses his research on the evolution and evolvability of biological systems. He lives in Zurich.

Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal
ForeWord Magazine 2009 Book of the Year Award

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 by Mark Twain

Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait, the first of three volumes collected by the Mark Twain Project on the centenary of the author's death. It is published complete and unexpurgated for the first time. (Twain wanted his more scalding opinions suppressed until long after his death.) Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are gorgeous reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acidetched profiles of friends and enemies, from his "fiendish" Florentine landlady to the fatuous and "grotesque" Rockefellers; a searing polemic on a 1906 American massacre of Filipino insurgents; a hilarious screed against a hapless editor who dared tweak his prose; and countless tales of the author's own bamboozlement, unto bankruptcy, by publishers, business partners, doctors, miscellaneous moochers; he was even outsmarted by a wild turkey. Laced with Twain's unique blend of humor and vitriol, the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its author's mind. His is a world where every piety conceals fraud and every arcadia a trace of violence; he relishes the human comedy and reveres true nobility, yet as he tolls the bell for friends and family--most tenderly in an elegy for his daughter Susy, who died in her early 20s of meningitis--he feels that life is a pointless charade. Twain's memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his vision of America--half paradise, half swindle--emerges with indelible force. 66 photos and line illus.

"Dip into the first enormous volume of Twain's autobiography that he had decreed should not appear until 100 years after his death. And Twain will begin to seem strange again, alluring and still astonishing, but less sure-footed, and at times both puzzled and puzzling in ways that still resonate with us, though not the ways we might expect."--New York Times

"Twain generously provides the 21st century aficionado a marvelous read. His crystalline humor and expansive range are a continuous source of delight and awe. . . . [He] has given us 'an astonishment' in his autobiography with his final, beautifully unorganized genius and intemperate thoughts. Pull up a chair and revel."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Bible and the People by Lori Anne Ferrell

In the eleventh century, the Bible was available only in expensive and rare hand-copied manuscripts. Today, millions of people from all walks of life seek guidance, inspiration, entertainment, and answers from their own editions of the Bible. This illustrated book tells the story of what happened to the ancient set of writings we call the Bible during those thousand years. Anchoring the story in material evidence—hundreds of different translations and versions of the Bible—Lori Anne Ferrell discusses how the Bible has been endlessly retailored to meet the changing needs of religion, politics, and the reading public while retaining its special status as a sacred text.

Focusing on the English-speaking world, The Bible and the People charts the extraordinary voyage of the Bible from manuscript Bibles to the Gutenberg volumes, Bibles commissioned by kings and queens, the Eliot Indian Bible, salesmen’s door-to-door Bibles, children’s Bibles, Gideon Bibles, teen magazine Bibles, and more. Ferrell discusses the Bible’s profound impact on readers over the centuries, and, in turn, the mark those readers made upon it. Enjoyable and informative, this book takes a fresh look at the fascinating and little-recognized connections among Christian, political, and book history.

"This unusual and very readable book offers an insight into the reception of the Bible by ordinary people at different times in history. Full of historical gems, this is a fascinating account of the world's most read (and owned), but least understood, book."—Christopher Rowland, University of Oxford

"In this . . . engaging text, Ferrell tours the history of the Bible as it has been copied, translated, annotated, dressed up and every which way adapted to changing times for English-speaking readers. . . . Ferrell rightly recognized this text's crucial place in the evolution of Anglo-American Christianity and in the heart of Christians."—Publishers Weekly

Adam Smith. An Enlightened Life by Nicholas Phillipson

Adam Smith (1723–90) is celebrated all over the world as the author of The Wealth of Nations and the founder of modern economics. A few of his ideas--that of the “invisible hand” of the market and that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” have become iconic. Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important. This book shows the extent to which The Wealth of Nations and Smith’s other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, were part of a larger scheme to establish a grand “Science of Man,” one of the most ambitious projects of the European Enlightenment, which was to encompass law, history, and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics, and which was only half complete on Smith’s death in 1790.

Nick Phillipson reconstructs Smith’s intellectual ancestry and shows what Smith took from, and what he gave to, in the rapidly changing intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Above all he explains how far Smith’s ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume.

Nick Phillipson is one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment. An Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, he has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, the Folger Library, and the Ludwigs-Maximillian Universitat. An associate editor on the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and a founding editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History, he was codirector of the Science of Man in Scotland project and past president of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.

Favorite Business Book of the Year, James Pressley, Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Best Book of 2010, The Atlantic
Critics' Favorite Book of 2010, The New Yorker
Best Business Book of 2010, Tyler Cowen, NPR's "Marketplace"

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

In a wide-ranging intellectual career, Michel de Montaigne found no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well. By casting her biography of the writer as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question How to live? Bakewell limns Montaigne’s ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge.

Embedded in the 20 life-knowledge responses, readers will find essential facts—when and where Montaigne was born, how and whom he married, how he became mayor of Bordeaux, how he managed a public life in a time of lethal religious and political passions. But Bakewell keeps the focus on the inner evolution of the acute mind informing Montaigne’s charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays.

Flexible and curious, this was a mind at home contemplating the morality of cannibals, the meaning of his own near-death experience, and the puzzlingly human behavior of animals. And though Montaigne has identified his own personality as his overarching topic, Bakewell marvels at the way Montaigne’s prose has enchanted diverse readers—Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and Gide—with their own reflections. Because Montaigne’s capacious mirror still captivates many, this insightful life study will win high praise from both scholars and general readers. -- Booklist

“This charming biography shuffles incidents from Montaigne’s life and essays into twenty thematic chapters…Bakewell clearly relishes the anthropological anecdotes that enliven Montaigne’s work, but she handles equally well both his philosophical influences and the readers and interpreters who have guided the reception of the essays.”—The New Yorker

Inside Job. Directed by Charles Ferguson

Inside Job provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.

Academy Awards, Oscar. Nominated
Gotham Awards, Best Documentary. Nominated
Satellite Awards Best Motion Picture, Documentary. Nominated

Countdown to Zero. Directed by Lucy Walker

Countdown to Zero traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs: nine nations possessing nuclear weapons capabilities with others racing to join them, leaving the world held in a delicate balance that could be shattered by an act of terrorism, failed diplomacy, or a simple accident. The film makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament; an issue more topical than ever with the Obama administration working to revive this goal in the present day.

With a rigorous eye, Blindsight's Lucy Walker examines the arms race from the inception of the atomic bomb to the present. She builds her three-part structure around a speech from President Kennedy, in which he warns of "accident, miscalculation, and madness" in regard to nuclear power. If Kennedy serves as the film's conscience, physicist Robert Oppenheimer serves as its heart--the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project only to regret the death and destruction it would engender (footage of the pale-eyed Oppenheimer is almost as eerie as his prophetic words). Even Oppenheimer, though, couldn't have predicted the ready availability of highly enriched uranium in the years after the Cold War, one of Walker's more hilling revelations. Aside from the deadly explosions in Oklahoma City, Madrid, and other urban centers, Walker looks at a number of near misses. Her speakers include
top minds from the fields of academia, government, and journalism, from Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev to Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf (former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson serves as de facto narrator). As Kennedy concluded, "The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us," and Walker ends on a note of guarded optimism,
speaking with F. W. de Klerk, who dismantled South Africa's nuclear infrastructure during his administration. Most of Walker's other subjects, regardless of their political affiliation, agree that it's the right thing to do.

Satellite Awards Best Motion Picture, Documentary. Nominated

The Nature of Existence. Directed by Roger Nygard

Roger Nygard has taken his open-minded attitude and aptitude for locating incredible/insane people, and applied it to answering the big question: Why do we exist? By locating beliefs in their geographical origins the link between culture and faith is exposed, and the beauty of the landscape and architecture is just as compelling as the views expressed in them. --Fiona Scoble, Festival Daily, Cambridge Film Festival, England

“The film is really mostly about the foibles of religion, but gently so. It benefits from director Roger Nygard’s (“Trekkies”) light comic touch and heartfelt “desire to communicate truth,” as one subject says is often lacking in discussions of religious beliefs.” Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times

“The film treads ground covered in films like Diane Keaton’s ‘Heaven’ and James Toback’s ‘Big Bang’ … [The Nature of Existence] is quicker, funnier and less pretentious.” Mike Hale, The New York Times

“The Nature of Existence, is not so much an inquiry into the nature of religion and the eternal, but a tossed salad of all the world’s ideas about religion.” Peter Simek, D Magazine

Bartók: Piano Concertos Nos. 1, 2 & 3 (complete)

This is the first concerto recording by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet for Chandos. Following the tremendous success of his complete Debussy piano music edition (‘This could well be the finest and most challenging of all Debussy piano cycles’ – Bryce Morrison, Gramophone) – which scooped awards from both Gramophone and BBC Music – and the launch of his ambitious Haydn Piano Sonatas series, the pianist now turns his attention to
some of the mightiest concertos of the twentieth century.

International Piano Choice
Gramophone Editors Choice
The Independent Album of the Week
BBC Music Magazine Orchestral Choice
BBC Music Magazine Awards 2011 Orchestral Finalist

Chandos, 10610

Poul Ruders. Four Dances

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Oliver Knussen, conductor

On this disc three of Ruders’s pivotal chamber works are in the hands of one of Europe's leading new music ensembles Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Four Dances in One Movement (1983) is an emotional sequence of four pure musical characters. Abysm (2000), which Ruders has written for BCMG, and Nightshade (1987) are two modern tone poems rooted in both dark and moving sound worlds.

BIRMINGHAM CONTEMPORARY MUSIC GROUP (BCMG) was formed in 1987 by musicians from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle, the Group’s Founding Patron. BCMG is one of Europe’s
leading ensembles and has won many awards for its work in attracting new audiences for contemporary music.

OLIVER KNUSSEN is one of the most respected figures in British contemporary music. He is in international demand as an illuminating interpretation of twentieth century music, and he appears regularly with the major orchestras of the world. He was made a CBE in 1994 and is Conductor Laureate of the London Sinfonietta.

American Record Guide - "I have been listening to this constantly for over a month...The playing is spectacular"

BBC Music Magazine, 5 Stars - “Performances are as accurate and committed as you would expect from the BCMG and Knussen, with recorded sound that gives the textures clarity and depth”

The Guardian - "This is a bracing, sensuous ear-opener."

BBC Music Magazine Awards 2011 Chamber Finalist

Dacapo: 8226028