Looks at how and where wine is made and how this affects its quality and pricing, including information on how the professionals taste and rate wine and a country-by-country tour of the latest vintages.

Essays and addresses on man's new knowledge in the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, from the viewpoint of an evolutionary humanist.

The goal of this book is to present a unified mathematical treatment of diverse problems in mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineer ing using geometric algebra. Geometric algebra was invented by William Kingdon Clifford in 1878 as a unification and generalization of the works of Grassmann and Hamilton, which came more than a quarter of a century before. Whereas the algebras of Clifford and Grassmann are well known in advanced mathematics and physics, they have never made an impact in elementary textbooks where the vector algebra of Gibbs-Heaviside still predominates. The approach to Clifford algebra adopted in most of the ar ticles here was pioneered in the 1960s by David Hestenes. Later, together with Garret Sobczyk, he developed it into a unified language for math ematics and physics. Sobczyk first learned about the power of geometric algebra in classes in electrodynamics and relativity taught by Hestenes at Arizona State University from 1966 to 1967. He still vividly remembers a feeling of disbelief that the fundamental geometric product of vectors could have been left out of his undergraduate mathematics education. Geometric algebra provides a rich, general mathematical framework for the develop ment of multilinear algebra, projective and affine geometry, calculus on a manifold, the representation of Lie groups and Lie algebras, the use of the horosphere and many other areas. This book is addressed to a broad audience of applied mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and engineers.

My Promised Land by Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit has been one of the most widely discussed and lavishly praised books about Israel in recent years. It has garnered encomiums from a broad spectrum of influential voices, including Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Jonathan Freedland, Jeffrey Goldberg, Franklin Foer, and Dwight Garner. Were he not already inured to the logrolling that passes for informed opinion on this topic, Norman Finkelstein might have been surprised, astonished even. That’s because, as he reveals with typical precision, My Promised Land is riddled with omission, distortion, falsehood, and sheer nonsense. In brief chapters that analyze Shavit’s defense of Zionism and Israel’s Jewish identity, its nuclear arsenal and its refusal to negotiate peace, Finkelstein shows how highly selective criticism and sanctimonious handwringing are deployed to create a paean to modern Israel more sophisticated than the traditional our-country-right-or-wrong. In this way, Shavit hopes to win back an American Jewish community increasingly alienated from a place it once regarded as home. However, because the myths he recycles have been so comprehensively shattered, this project is unlikely to succeed. Like his landmark debunking of Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, Finkelstein’s clinical dissection of My Promised Land will be welcomed by those who prefer truth to propaganda, and who yearn for a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict based on justice, rather than arguments framed by anguish and schmaltz.