Behind the wall

Sample

Stuart Stevens

The author describes his experiences traveling with three companions from Beijing to India via Kashgar in order to retrace the route followed by Peter Fleming in 1936.

Sample

Joyce Badgley Hunsaker

Provides paintings, photographs, newspaper articles, and fictionalized diaries of real people who traveled the Oregon Trail throughout the nineteenth century.

Sample

Murray Gell-Mann

From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes a highly personal, unifying vision of the natural world. As a theoretical physicist, Murray Gell-Mann has explored nature at its most fundamental level. His achievements include the 1969 Nobel Prize for work leading up to his discovery of the quark - the basic building block of all atomic nuclei throughout the universe. But Gell-Mann is a man of many intellectual passions, with lifelong interests in fields that seek to understand existence at its most complex: natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking. These seemingly disparate pursuits come together in Gell-Mann's current work at the Santa Fe Institute, where scientists are investigating the similarities and differences among complex adaptive systems - systems that learn or evolve by utilizing acquired information. They include a child learning his or her native language, a strain of bacteria becoming resistant to an antibiotic, the scientific community testing new theories, or an artist implementing a creative idea. The Quark and the Jaguar is Gell-Mann's own story of finding the connections between the basic laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world. The simple: a quark inside an atom. The complex: a jaguar prowling its jungle territory in the night. Exploring the relationship between them becomes a series of exciting intellectual adventures.

Sample

Gustave Flaubert

Tussen 1849 en 1851 bereisde Flaubert (1821-1888) met zijn vriend Du Camp Egypte, Palestina, Syrië, Libanon, Griekenland, Turkije en Italië. Zijn reisaantekeningen tot Rhodos zijn in 1910 posthuum verschenen. Met de brieven die hij onderweg schreef, vormen ze waardevol materiaal voor onderzoekers van zijn literaire werk. Zijn eerste aantekeningen bewerkte hij, zoals in zijn tijd vaker gebeurde, tot een realistisch-sentimenteel relaas. Spoedig beperkte hij zich echter tot treffende beschrijvingen, waaruit een levendige belangstelling spreekt. Flaubert blijkt zich voor deze reis - toen een hele onderneming - goed te hebben gedocumenteerd. Hij bestemde deze aantekeningen, gezien enkele zeer persoonlijke en zelfs compromitterende passages, zeker niet voor publikatie. Wel putte hij eruit voor zijn Oosterse roman Salambô (1862).