Green polymer materials from biomass-based natural resources are of paramount importance in a range of applications, from biomedicine to biocomposites. Indeed, during the last few years there has been increasing demand for green biocomposites obtained from renewable and sustainable biomass-based resources. Plants, grasses, straws, agriculture residues, algae, water plants etc. are among one of...

'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' Ranging from the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity, A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Published almost a decade...

1984

The author argues that the basic weakness of neoclassical economics is the eradication of value, which reduces economics to market valuation and results in defining the market as a self-regulatory mechanism. The danger lies in the fact that contemporary economic activity is a linear process, which means that we focus on generating instrumental values, i.e. achieving a surplus in relation to...

This concise introduction to modern climatology covers the key topics for intermediate undergraduate students on one-semester courses. The treatment of topics is non-mathematical wherever possible, instead focusing on physical processes to allow students to grasp concepts more easily. Full-color illustrations support the text and supplementary topics are covered in boxes, enabling students to...

This book illustrates the history of Atomic Physics and shows how its most recent advances allow the possibility of performing precise measurements and achieving an accurate control on the atomic state. Written in an introductory style, this book is addressed to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to more experienced researchers who need to remain up-to-date with the most...

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. In these galvanising speeches and essays, George Monbiot calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the...

This book addresses herbicides and their use as an important aspect of modern weed management and strives to place them in an ecological framework. Many weed scientists believe agriculture is a continuing struggle with weeds--without good weed control, good and profitable agriculture is impossible. Each agricultural discipline sees itself as central to agriculture's success and continued...

Our Mutual Friend, Dickens' last complete novel, gives one of his most comprehensive and penetrating accounts of Victorian society. Its vision of a culture stifled by materialistic values emerges not just through its central narratives, but through its apparently incidental characters and scenes. The chief of its several plots centres on John Harmon who returns to England as his father's heir....

A sweeping intellectual history of games and their importance to human progress. We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to practice making predictions about the future. Games are thought to be older than written language, and have now become the dominant cultural media―bigger than movies, TV, music, and literature combined. They are also...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 On 7 April 1986, Annie Ernaux’s mother, after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, died in a retirement home in the suburbs of Paris. Shocked by this loss which, despite her mother’s condition, she had refused to fathom, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time in an effort to recover the different facets of a woman whose...

The first novel from one of Italy’s most innovative writers of the 20th century 'The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict.' Italo Calvino At the height of Fascist rule in Italy and following the death of his mother, Carlo Emilio Gadda began work on his first novel, The Experience of Pain. This...

The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor is translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, with an introduction by Neal Ascherton. After the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient rule of the Abyssinian monarchy, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to tell their stories. Here, their...

The Time Traveler Stephen Wilkes’s day-to-night portraits of iconic locations around the world If you were to stand in one spot at an iconic location for 30 hours and simply observe, never closing your eyes, you still wouldn’t be able to take in all the detail and emotion found in a Stephen Wilkes panoramic photograph. Not only does Wilkes shoot over 1,500 exposures from a fixed angle, he also...

In the year 2015 the Polish Institute of World Art Studies, together with the National Museum in Kraków and the National Museum in Warsaw and with the collaboration of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, undertook new research into the work of Henryk Siemiradzki, a distinguished Polish painter who was also associated with Russian and Italian artistic circles. This five-year...

In Measuring and Reasoning, Fred L. Bookstein examines the way ordinary arithmetic and numerical patterns are translated into scientific understanding, showing how the process relies on two carefully managed forms of argument: • Abduction: the generation of new hypotheses to accord with findings that were surprising on previous hypotheses, and • Consilience: the confirmation of numerical...

Award-winning original fiction for learners of English. At seven levels, from Starter to Advanced, this impressive selection of carefully graded readers offers exciting reading for every student's capabilities. In the early 1990s Katy, a young reporter, arrives in Sarajevo, a city under siege, and receives conflicting advice from two colleagues. 'Of all the wars I've been in,' a news...

In The Social Contract Rousseau (1712-1778) argues for the preservation of individual freedom in political society. An individual can only be free under the law, he says, by voluntarily embracing that law as his own. Hence, being free in society requires each of us to subjugate our desires to the interests of all, the general will. Some have seen in this the promise of a free and equal...

‘Koa Beck writes with passion and insight about the knotted history of racism within women’s movements and feminist culture, past and present. Curious, rigorous, and ultimately generous, White Feminism is a pleasure and an education.’ Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad 'Intellectually smart and emotionally intelligent, Beck brilliantly articulates how feminism...

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates ""The River,"" or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life. These professional risk takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true-believers and blue-chip art...