Surprise, security, and the American experience

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John Rajchman

In this series of overlapping essays on architecture and art, John Rajchman attempts to do theory in a new way that takes off from the philosophy of the late Gilles Deleuze. Starting from notions of folding, lightness, ground, abstraction, and future cities, he embarks on a conceptual voyage whose aim is to help "construct" a new space of connections, to "build" a new idiom, perhaps even to suggest a new architecture. Along the way, he addresses questions of the new abstraction, operative form, other geometries, new technologies, global cities, ideas of the virtual and the formless, and possibilities for critical theory after utopia and transgression.

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T. Kenneth Fowler

In The Fusion Quest, T. Kenneth Fowler offers a vivid and colorful insider's account of the decades-long search for fusion power - a potentially abundant and environmentally "clean" energy source that could sustain industrial society in the twenty-first century and beyond. Scientists have known for more than sixty years that nuclear fusion powers the sun and stars. But would it work on Earth? To help answer this question, Fowler explains the physical principles on which fusion is based, describes the experiments that have led to the present state of the art, and shows how all these considerations would affect the design of possible fusion-based nuclear power plants. Fowler describes magnets nearly as cold as outer space surrounding miniature "stars" hotter than the sun; lasers that for the merest split-second produce a blinding flash more powerful than every light bulb in America turned on at once. And he recounts the exciting discoveries of classical physics from Newton to Einstein, from Faraday to Lorentz, that provide the foundation of fusion science today. Ultimately, The Fusion Quest offers an informative and timely look at fusion's potential to provide an environmentally acceptable new energy source in a future more vulnerable to energy shortages and pollution than many of us realize.

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Nora Roberts

When the Lusitania sank, more than one thousand people died. One passenger, however, survived to become a changed man, giving up his life as a petty thief but keeping a small silver statue that would become a family heirloom to future generations. Now, nearly a century later, that heirloom, one of a priceless, long-separated set of three, has been snatched away from the Sullivans. And Malachi, Gideon, and Rebecca Sullivan are determined to recover their great-great-grandfather's treasure, reunite the Three Fates, and make their fortune. The quest will take them from their home in Ireland to Helsinki, Prague, and New York and introduce them to a formidable female professor whose knowledge of Greek mythology will aid them in their quest; to a daring exotic dancer who sees the Fates as her chance at a new life; and to a seductive security expert who knows how to play high-tech cat-and-mouse. And it will pit them in a suspenseful fight against an ambitious woman who will stop at nothing to acquire the Fates.

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Laura Hoptman

"The art of drawing flourished in the 1990s, and broke significantly from the tenets of twentieth-century modernism. Drawing Now: Eight Propositions surveys this new work, and shows drawing as no less adventurous and aesthetically satisfying than any of the more recent and seemingly more current methods of artmaking today. Carefully executed and highly finished, the drawings explored in this book - which accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (in its temporary home in Queens, New York) in 2002-2003 - are largely representational and descriptive, sometimes with an interest in story-telling. Some show affinities with illustration, fashion, or comic strips; others are closer to industrial and commercial varieties of precision drawing, such as architectural plans and scientific renderings; still others take ideas from the traditions of ornament."--Jacket.