Leading and up-and-coming scientists and science writers cast their minds one million years into the future to imagine the fate of the human and/or extraterrestrial galaxy. This volume of fifteen new, specially commissioned essays by notable journalists and scholars such as Rudy Rucker, Jim Holt, and Gregory Benford presents a series of speculations on the most radical but well-grounded ideas they can conceive, projecting the universe as it might be in the year 1,000,000 C.E. Their collective effort—first attempted by H. G. Wells in his 1893 essay "The Man of the Year Million"—is an exploration into a barely conceivable distant future, where the authors confront far-flung possibilities, at times bordering on philosophy of science. How would the galaxy look if it were redesigned for optimal energy use and maximized intelligence? What is a universe bereft of stars? Contributors include Amara D. Angelica, Catherine Asaro, Gregory Benford, Robert Bradbury, Sean M. Carroll, Anne Corwin, Dougal Dixon, Robin Hanson, Steven B. Harris, Jim Holt, Lisa Kaltenegger, Wil McCarthy, Rudy Rucker, Pamela Sargent, and George Zebrowski.

Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

Science & Math

Astronomy & Space Science

Atlas & Co.

Anselm, Ockham, and Descartes: three thinkers locked in one of Western philosophy's greatest debates. In 1078, Anselm of Bec wrote the most famous proof in Western religious tradition—what we know now as the "ontological argument" for God's existence. Stating that the "idea" and "reality" of God were the same, Anselm provoked enormous controversy through a radical approach: rather than appealing to the Bible, church authority, or the physical senses, he employed the faculties of his mind, crafting a method of logic that paved the way for modern thought. Larry Witham traces our modern-day conceptions of faith and reason back to Anselm's formidable claim. In attempting to "prove God," Anselm unleashed a medieval debate that culminated in William of Ockham, whose notorious "razor" denied all such proofs, limiting knowledge to "things" only. Scrupulously managing fact and theory, Witham tells the story of this intellectual quest across the Middle Ages and how it inspired the West's "first modern philosopher," René Descartes. By turns history, biography, and philosophical inquiry, The Proof of God follows one of the seminal arguments of Western belief from its inception to the present.

The Proof of God: The Debate that Shaped Modern Belief

History

Witham, Larry

World

This is a searing portrait of the human devastation wrought by the Bosnian wars, and their aftermath - told through the stories of those who are left alive and looking for their families and their remains - by a young writer who has all the makings of a Kapuscinski or a Gourevitch.This book is suitable for readers of Philip Gourevitch, Janine Di Giovanni, Timothy Garton Ash, Slavenka Drakulic, Fergal Keane, Michael Ignatieff, Anna Funder, Misha Glenny.During four years of war in Bosnia, over 100,000 people lost their lives. But it was months, even years, before the mass graves started to yield up their dead and the process of identification, burial and mourning could begin. For many, the waiting, the searching and the suspended grieving still continues.Here we travel through the ravaged post-war landscape in the company of a few of those who survived, as they visit the scenes of their loss: a hall where the clothing of victims is displayed; an underground cave with its pale jumble of bones; a camp for homeless refugees; a city now abandoned to the ghosts of painful memories; and a funeral service where a family finally says goodbye. These encounters are snapshots and memorials, capturing a jagged moment in a community's history as it is still flinching from its raw and recent past, not quite yet able to believe in a possibility of a peaceful future.

Like Eating a Stone

Tochman, Wojciech

An elegant boxed set of travel classics about France, with an introduction from the best-selling author of Le Divorce. In this inaugural edition of our Atlas Pocket Classics series, Diane Johnson introduces three masterpieces of travel writing. Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey is the notebook he kept during his respite from poor health, tormented love, and inadequate friends—a thoroughly entertaining account of the French people and their country. James Fenimore Cooper's Gleanings in France, one of his rarest works, is an elegant collection of his letters home; he offers a discriminating portrait of France in the last days of its final experiment with monarchy, and offers practical advice on the art of travel. Edith Wharton proclaims in the opening lines of A Motor-flight through France that "the motor-car has restored the romance of travel"—then sets off in the new invention to explore the cities and countryside of the nation she loved above all; Wharton's spirited account of her journey is a declaration of her passion for travel and her deep affinity for the people and places of France.

Atlas Pocket Classics: France: (Travels with a Donkey, Gleanings in France, A Motor-flight through France)

Travel

COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE

WHARTON,EDITH

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS

Europe

A best-seller in Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil: the first-ever world history of the destruction of books. A product of ten years of research and support from leading American and European universities, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books traces a tragic story: the smashed tablets of ancient Sumer, the widespread looting of libraries in post-war Iraq, the leveling of the Library of Alexandria, book burnings by Crusaders and Nazis, and censorship against authors past and present. With diligence and grace, Báez mounts a compelling investigation into the motives behind the destruction of books, reading man's violence against writing as a perverse anti-creation. "By destroying," Báez argues, "man ratifies this ritual of permanence, purification and consecration; by destroying, man brings to the surface a behavior originating in the depth of his personality." His findings ultimately attest to the lasting power of books as the great human repository of knowledge and memory, fragile yet vital bulwarks against the intransigence and barbarity of every age.

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq

Literature & Fiction

Báez, Fernando

History & Criticism

A new biography of Western literature's most iconic writer, from the acclaimed novelist and author of About Schmidt. Kafkaesque: the very word evokes tortuous bureaucracy, crushing self-doubt, and an almost unbearable inadequacy in the face of higher powers. After Kafka, it can be said, literature was not the same. In the few novels and short stories he left behind, he distilled the horrors of the new age. Kafka's is the voice of the outsider—that is, the voice of each one of us—at once defined by its affiliations and completely, utterly alone. The product of both a transitional age (the beginning of the 20th century) and a territory in flux (Czechoslovakia), Kafka spoke and wrote German in Czech territory. He was a Jew among Christians, a non-observant Jew among believers. Louis Begley, himself a multilingual exile and, like Kafka, a lawyer and writer, renders Kafka's life with sensitivity and insight. Begley's discussion of Kafka's masterpiece The Trial, along with shorter works such as "The Metamorphosis," opens a window on a tormented soul, one of the most intriguing figures of the modern period.

The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay

Biographies & Memoirs

Begley,Louis

Arts & Literature

"A writer of scintillating style and resonant substance," (Publishers Weekly), bestselling author Francine du Plessix Gray chronicles the incandescent life of the most celebrated woman of letters of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. The daughter of the second most important man in France, Louis XVI's Minister of Finances, Jacques Necker, Madame de Staël was born into a world of political and intellectual prominence. Later, she married Sweden's ambassador to the French court, and for a span of twenty years, she held the limelight as a political figure and prolific writer. Despite a plain appearance, she was notoriously seductive and enjoyed whirlwind affairs with some of the most influential men of her time. She always attracted controversy, and was demonized by Napoleon for her forthrightness, the sheer power of her intellect, and the progressiveness of her salon, which was a hotbed for the expression of liberal ideals. The emperor exiled her, on and off, for the last fifteen years of her life. Madame de Staël—force of nature, exuberant idealist, and ultimate enthusiast—waged a lifelong struggle against all that was tyrannical, cynical, or passionless in her time, and left Europe a legacy of enlightened liberalism that radiated throughout the continent during the nineteenth century.

Madame de Stael: The First Modern Woman

Du Plessix Gray, Francine

Historical

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