BRILL
Cinema and television in Singapore; resistance in one dimension.
Tan (social and political sciences, U. of Cambridge) offers a study of the political significance, possibilities, and limitations of art and popular culture in today's Singapore. The author notes that Singapore's creative talent is likely to use media to criticize the status quo and not to promote the ideas of the dominant classes. He also states that authoritarian capitalism is quite capable of transforming opposing, resistant and alternative expressions into profitable system-supporting commodities. The book is an interesting, very thought-provoking exercise in interpreting the unusual city- state that is Singapore through the eyes of its creative inhabitants. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Civil-military cooperation in response to a complex emergency; just another drill?
Building peace requires much more than the trappings of war to impede violence. In most cases civil authority, whatever that may be, is an integral part of the peace support process. Rietjens (civil-military cooperation, Netherlands Defense Academy) analyzes civil-military cooperation at the theoretical and historical levels, concentrating on Kosovo (1999-2000), Kabul (2003-2004) and the Baghlan in Afghanistan (2004-2005) to determine the effectiveness of logistics, construction and security. He describes how the cooperation works in theory, and current process models of civil-military cooperation, then analyzes each of the cases in turn, building to a cross-case analysis of performance. He concludes with recommendations for use in future peacekeeping and emergency situations, whether at a region, national or international level. He includes an impressive list of references and resources. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Classical Arabic humanities in their own terms; festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs on his 65th birthday presented by his students and colleagues.
Gruendler (Arabic, Yale U.) presents a collection of 21 essays honoring Arabic scholar Wolfhart Heinrichs, written by colleagues and doctoral students at Harvard, and by former colleagues in Europe. The papers include varied approaches to elements of Arabic-Islamic civilization, in the areas of linguistics, literature, literary theory, prosody, religion, ritual, economics, and zoology, as well as Old Iranian, Persian, Greek, and Byzantine written traditions. They explore a range of topics: specific Arabic words or morphemes; literary genres and subgenres, such as oration, ode, macaronic poem, travel narrative, or figures within them, such as the trickster and the devil; cultural concepts, such as wishing, gift-giving, or discourse; and other phenomena, such as the role of gender in dream interpretation or the relative merits of luxury goods and mass-produced commodities. Also included are a short biographical sketch and a bibliography of Heinrichs' publications. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Classic ships of Islam; from Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean.
Agius (Arabic and Islamic material culture, U. of Exeter) combines literary, visual, and physical evidence from the past with information he has gained personally by watching and talking to people around the western Indian Ocean who still make the same kind of river boats and ocean-going ships that were made a millennium ago. Their longevity, he says, is one of the features that makes the designs he discusses classic. Quotations are in Arabic transliteration and English translation. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Connecting a city to the sea; the history of the Athenian long walls.
Volume 293 in the Mnemosyne Supplementa, this publication studies the Long Walls joining Athens with its harbors, which are universally accepted as symbols of naval imperialism and the crux of a departure from traditional Greek military strategy during the late 5th century BCE. Conwell (Latin and history, Baylor School, Tennessee) presents the first comprehensive history of the Long Walls, studying their purpose, dating their construction phases, and noting their fluctuating practicality and importance; the catalyst for the research is the suggestion that the Athenians would not have relied on the walls when the sea lanes were not controlled effectively by their navy. The book contains eight sections; each section represents a chronological era in the construction and use of the Long Walls from approximately 462 to the mid-280s BCE, and concludes with a chapter on the strategic context of the Long Walls. This title is occasionally illustrated with references to black-and-white photographs, maps, and diagrams. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Conservatism and innovation in the Hebrew language of the Hellenistic period; proceedings.
Proceedings of an international symposium held in Strasbourg in May 2006. Fifteen contributions examine linguistic and philological issues, and seek to relate the Hebrew texts of the Hellenistic period to earlier and later traditions. Four of the essays are in French, the remaining chapters in English. A sampling of topics: Amoraic Hebrew in the light of Ben Sira's linguistic innovations, aspects of the verbal systems in Qumran Hebrew, the infinitive absolute as finite verb and standard literary Hebrew of the Second Temple Period, constituent order in existential clauses, reflections on adjunct expression in the Manual of Discipline, spoken Hebrew of the late Second Temple period according to oral and written Samaritan tradition, and the weak consonants in the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Hexapla transliterations. No subject index. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Constitutionalism; new challenges; European law from a Nordic perspective.
The impetus for this book came from a conference on recent developments in Nordic and German constitutional law that occurred in Berlin in 2002. The volume includes edited and updated versions of the majority of papers presented at the conference. Contents include theoretical perspectives, contemporary constitutional perspectives, and Nordic perspectives. The scholarship is high quality in its dealings with political and ideological developments in the Nordic states, Germany, and Europe. The book also offers more general aspects on recent developments in international constitutional theory. Many of the topics are of general interest, including discussion of constitutions and globalization and the European Union's constitutional project. A well-manufactured volume, this book was published by Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Cross, crescent and conversion; studies on medieval Spain and christendom in memory of Richard Fletcher.
Scholars mostly in England but also Scotland, the US, Ireland, and even Spain offer essays on topics of interest to late British historian Fletcher. Many of them place Spain in the context of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean world. The topics include civil society and the First Crusade, a view of Islam and the West from 12th-century León, the abundance and scarcity of food in the Inquisition records of Languedoc, the Jewish Christianity of Alfonso de Cartagena and Juan de Torquemada, and the fall of the Roman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Cultural human rights.
The human rights movement, being born and bred in the Protestant West, perceives only individuals, but elsewhere in the world, the preservation of culture is important and is gradually seeping into the international legal regime. Contributors working in international or human rights, or with specific groups around the world explore such aspects as self-determination and cultural rights, indigenous peoples' cultural rights and the controversy over commercial use of their traditional knowledge, and the role of the state in balancing religious freedom with other human rights in a multicultural European context. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
A cumulative bibliography of medieval military history and technology; update 2003-2006.
DeVries (history, Loyola University, Maryland) is an acknowledged expert in the history of medieval warfare. This updated bibliography is a welcome resource for scholars in medieval studies across several disciplines. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
A cumulative index to volumes I-VI of Paul Oskar Kristeller's Iter italicum; accedunt alia itinera: A finding list of uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued humanistic manuscripts of the Renaissance...
Kristeller's (1905-99) six-volume list of manuscripts, published 1963-92, is arranged geographically, presumably so that travelers through Italy, carrying the six volumes with them, can look up what works are in nearby libraries. Scholars looking for a specific uncatalogued humanistic work of the Renaissance, and willing to arrange their itinerary to intersect it, were out of luck until this index appeared. It lists the works alphabetically by title or author, and cites the volume and page of the article about them. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Defining indentities; we, you, and the other in the Dead Sea Scrolls; proceedings.
The 15 papers explore issues of self-definition of Jewish groups in relation to or in reaction to other groups, peoples, or individuals both within and outside of Judaism as reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their topics include polarized self-identification, identity-constructing elements in the Psalms Pesher, keeping outsiders out, and the party of the circumcision. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean 1000-1500; aspects of cross-culture communication.
This volume of the Brill series on the medieval Mediterranean discusses the diplomatic documents that passed between Arab, Greek and Latin states in the Near East. Articles cover treaties, letters between rulers and charters. The time period includes 1000-1500 c.e. with most being thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The leaders who dictated the letters include popes, sultans, emperors, Italian merchant/princes, kings, abbots and heads of the military orders. While there is a great diversity in the tone, the common thread is that lines of international communication were open and that multi- lingual clerks provided translations both of cultural and language differences. Distributed in North America by David Brown Book Co. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Divine knowledge; Buddhist mathematics according to the anonymous Manual of Mongolian astrology and divination.
An American scholar of Inner Asia, and particularly the Mongols, Baumann embarked on this volume with two goals, and discovered that he had to give one priority over the other. He decided that exploring the first principles of knowledge would serve a supporting role while he explicated, transcribed, and translated an anonymous 19th-century manual of Mongolian Buddhist mathematics. The first section discusses not only the text itself, but Mongolian concepts of time, heaven, metaphysics, divination, mathematics, end times, and other matters. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Doing business in Mexico; 4v.
Published by Transnational Publishers and enclosed within a Martinus Nijhoff bindings (both are imprints of Brill), this four-volume work contains the 51st release of a work originally published in 1980. The editors have overseen a complete revision of the entire work, omitting a number of chapters and adding new or revising the remaining chapters. The topics include joint venturing in Mexico, investment under NAFTA Chapter 11, Mexican law of secured transactions, Mexican laws for the conservation of natural resources, options for resolving commercial disputes, and taking depositions in Mexico. Two volumes are devoted to documents, which are divided by topic, including basic documents of the Mexico-US relationship, intellectual property, commercial law, litigation and arbitration, and environmental law. Many of the contributors are bilingual lawyers and business professionals in Mexico with first- hand knowledge of cross-border concerns; all are specialists in US-Mexico relations. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The dynamics of corporate social responsibilities.
This volume explores whether multinational enterprises could and should do more to protect human rights in developing countries in the absence of specific legal requirements, and if so to what extent. Finding inadequacies in single-track legal requirement approaches and voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches, he aims to demonstrate the complementarities between law and the managerial discretion of CSR, citing examples of such strategies from corporate governance, environmental protection, criminal law, and regulations dealing with corporate social impacts. This model of working within the emerging regulatory regime of CSR highlights the importance of the context where CSR and law co-evolve and on the regulatory potential of public and private actors and the norms they apply. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Early Islamic legal theory; the Risala of Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i.
The earliest extant work of theoretical legal writing, Shafi'i's ninth-century Risala (Epistle) has been characterized by scholars as a synthesis of Islamic legal sources. Diverging from that received wisdom, Lowry (Near Eastern languages and civilizations, U. of Pennsylvania) argues that it is an effort to formulate an original and complete theoretical account of Islamic law. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Economic aspects of gambling regulation; EU and US perspectives.
Arguments are being made and law suits being filed to loosen national regulation of gambling in Europe, and to establish Union-wide regulation that would allow more international competition. Academics are now joining economic operators and government regulators in addressing the issue. Here economists from Europe and North America explore economic aspects of regulating gambling, with such discussions as lessons learned from the cost-benefit analysis of casinos, consumer interests and the taxation of gambling, and how an American casino broke the monopoly in Maastricht. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Emil L. Fackenheim; philosopher, theologian, Jew.
Emil Fackenheim was a Reform rabbi and a philosopher. He managed to escape Germany in 1939, immigrating to Canada, where he received his doctorate and led a congregation. For many years he kept his religious and philosophical work separate, but in 1967, he realized that it was necessary to integrate them and to finally delve into the moral and philosophical ramifications of the Holocaust. In this group of essays Portnoff (religious studies, Pomona College) Diamond (Jewish studies, University of Waterloo, Ontario) and Yaffe (philosophy and religious studies, University of North Texas) have selected articles that cover the stages of Fackenheim's life and philosophy. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an; CD-ROM ed.
This CD-ROM version is an institutional edition for 11 or more users. It contains the approximately 1000 entries from the magisterial multi-volume print version. The CD-ROM includes searchable bibliographies, search capacity in both Arabic and English, and a print option. The Encyclopedia consists of both short dictionary definitions and extended essays on terms, concepts, people, place names, cultural history, and exegesis relating to the Quran and its study. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars from Europe, North America, Israel, and Australia are the contributors. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an; CD-ROM ed.
This CD-ROM version is an institutional stand-alone edition. It contains the approximately 1000 entries from the magisterial multi- volume print version. The CD-ROM includes searchable bibliographies, search capacity in both Arabic and English, and a print option. The Encyclopedia consists of both short dictionary definitions and extended essays on terms, concepts, people, place names, cultural history, and exegesis relating to the Quran and its study. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars from Europe, North America, Israel, and Australia are the contributors. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an; CD-ROM ed.
This CD-ROM version is an institutional edition for 2-5 users. It contains the approximately 1000 entries from the magisterial multi- volume print version. The CD-ROM includes searchable bibliographies, search capacity in both Arabic and English, and a print option. The Encyclopedia consists of both short dictionary definitions and extended essays on terms, concepts, people, place names, cultural history, and exegesis relating to the Quran and its study. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars from Europe, North America, Israel, and Australia are the contributors. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an; CD-ROM ed.
This CD-ROM version is an institutional edition for 6-10 users. It contains the approximately 1000 entries from the magisterial multi- volume print version. The CD-ROM includes searchable bibliographies, search capacity in both Arabic and English, and a print option. The Encyclopedia consists of both short dictionary definitions and extended essays on terms, concepts, people, place names, cultural history, and exegesis relating to the Quran and its study. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars from Europe, North America, Israel, and Australia are the contributors. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an; CD-ROM ed.
This CD-ROM version is for the single user. It contains the approximately 1000 entries from the magisterial multi-volume print version. The CD-ROM includes searchable bibliographies, search capacity in both Arabic and English, and a print option. The Encyclopedia consists of both short dictionary definitions and extended essays on terms, concepts, people, place names, cultural history, and exegesis relating to the Quran and its study. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars from Europe, North America, Israel, and Australia are the contributors. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
