Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction. This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin. The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story--for nearly 8,000 years. We, however, have been literate so long that we've forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important messages orally over many generations--although reasoning back to the original events is possible only under rather specific conditions. Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps 100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to restoring some of that lost history and teaching us about human storytelling.

"This book embodies one person's life of creativity and the pursuit of a vision -- in this case an architectural vision. Years of teaching have allowed the author to observe that we all have the power to be creative. He lays out the experiential process of being creative, from early influences, through the evolutionary development of ideas and forms, and, finally, to the reality of multiple expressions."--Provided by publisher.

Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth is Rita Dove's first play. Set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, it has been performed to great critical acclaim.

Unifying the Universe: The Physics of Heaven and Earth provides a solid background in basic physics. With a humanistic perspective, it shows how science is significant for more than its technological consequences. The book includes clear and well-planned links to the arts and philosophies of relevant historical periods to bring science and the humanities together.

Immanuel Velikovsky called this book the "fulfillment of his oath of Hippocrates - to serve humanity." In this book he returns to his roots as a psychologist and psychoanalytical therapist, yet not with a single person as his patient but with humanity as a whole. After an extremely revealing overview of the foundations of the various psychoanalytical systems he makes the step into crowd psychology and reopens the case of Worlds in Collision from a totally different point of view: as a psychoanalytical case study. This way he shows that the blatant reactions to his theories (which are still going on today) have not been surprising but are actually inevitable from a psychological perspective - which equally holds for those who have defined our view of the world. At the same time he is able to reclassify the theories of Siegmund Freud and of C. G. Jung by finding a common basis for them. A journey through history, religion, mythology and art shows the overall range of the collective trauma and gives us - the patients - a message of extraordinary urgency and importance for the future.

In a groundbreaking work of "New Americanist" studies, John R. Eperjesi explores the cultural and economic formation of the Unites States relationship to China and the Pacific Rim in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eperjesi examines a variety of texts to explore the emergence of what Rob Wilson has termed the "American Pacific." Eperjesi shows how works ranging from Frank Norris' The Octopus to the Journal of the American Asiatic Association, from the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to the travel writings of Jack and Charmain London, and from Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--and the cultural dynamics that produced them--helped construct the myth of the American Pacific. By construing the Pacific Rim as a unified region binding together the territorial United States with the areas of Asia and the Pacific, he also demonstrates that the logic of the imperialist imaginary suggested it was not only proper but even incumbent upon the United States to exercise both political and economic influence in the region. As Donald E. Pease notes in his foreword, "by reading foreign policy and economic policy as literature, and by reconceptualizing works of American literature as extenuations of foreign policy and economic theory," Eperjesi makes a significant contribution to studies of American imperialism.

In our daily lives, in our memories and fantasies, our mental worlds overflow with faces. But what do we really know about this most remarkable feature of the human body? Why do we have faces at all, and brains that are good at reading them? What do our looks say – and not say – about our personalities? And perhaps the most compelling question of all: Why are we attracted to some faces more than others? In Your Face is an engaging and authoritative tour of the science of facial beauty and face perception. David Perrett, the pre-eminent scholar in the field, reveals and interprets the most remarkable findings and in the process demolishes many popular myths, setting the record straight on what neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are teaching us about beauty. The record is more surprising and often more unsettling than you might think.