Introduction to JavaScript Object Notation

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Albert Camus declared that a writer's duty is twofold: "the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance against oppression." These twin obsessions help explain something of Camus' remarkable character, which is the overarching subject of this sympathetic and lively book. Through an exploration of themes that preoccupied Camus--absurdity, silence, revolt, fidelity, and moderation--Robert Zaretsky portrays a moralist who refused to be fooled by the nobler names we assign to our actions, and who pushed himself, and those about him, to challenge the status quo.Though we do not face the same dangers that threatened Europe when Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, we confront other alarms. Herein lies Camus's abiding significance. Reading his work, we become more thoughtful observers of our own lives. For Camus, rebellion is an eternal human condition, a timeless struggle against injustice that makes life worth living. But rebell

How can we achieve and sustain a "decent" liberal society, one that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all and inspires individuals to sacrifice for the common good? In this book, a continuation of her explorations of emotions and the nature of social justice, Martha Nussbaum makes the case for love. Amid the fears, resentments, and competitive concerns that are endemic even to good societies, public emotions rooted in love--in intense attachments to things outside our control--can foster commitment to shared goals and keep at bay the forces of disgust and envy.Great democratic leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., have understood the importance of cultivating emotions. But people attached to liberalism sometimes assume that a theory of public sentiments would run afoul of commitments to freedom and autonomy. Calling into question this perspective, Nussbaum investigates historical proposals for a public "civil religion" or "religion

The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and sca

From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central

What does history mean today? What is its relevance to the modern world? In contemplating fundamental questions about history and the Western legacy, the noted classical historian Christian Meier offe

These ten holy women, whose vitae range from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, represent a wide variety of Byzantine female saints. From nuns disguised as monks to desert harlots, these holy wome

After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers.

Images for Classicists shows how text and image taken together complicate and enrich our understanding of ancient culture. Working to dissolve distinctions between text- and artifact-based scholarship

Lockhart’s Mathematician’s Lament outlined how we introduce math to students in the wrong way. Measurement explains how math should be done. With plain English and pictures, he makes complex ideas abo

According to tradition, the First Crusade began at the instigation of Pope Urban II and culminated in July 1099, when thousands of western European knights liberated Jerusalem from the rising menace o

This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, ba

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers

What made Henry Kissinger the kind of diplomat he was? What experiences and influences shaped his worldview and provided the framework for his approach to international relations? Jeremi Suri offers a

Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere's most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America's racial div

If you've replaced a computer lately - or a cell phone, a camera, a television - chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one

Homeric epic is concerned with the past. Its heroes are larger than life and accomplish their exploits in a bygone age outside the reach of ordinary mortals. Yet epic is not only a nostalgic memory of

Bosnian traditional ballads have intrigued many by their beauty and eloquence, from Goethe's poetic interest in them in the eighteenth century to the work of twentieth-century scholars such as Milman

In Reliving Golgotha, Richard Trexler brings an important new perspective to religious spectacle in an engrossing exploration of the annual passion play at Iztapalapa, the largest and poorest borough

From its inception just before World War I to its demise during the Stalinist repression of Ukrainian culture in the 1930s, Ukrainian Futurism was much maligned and poorly understood. It has remained

This intellectually bold but accessible book seeks to go beyond limitations of the reigning neoclassical and institutional paradigms in explaining the organization of economic activity. It does this b

Italo Calvino, one of the world's best storytellers, died on the eve of his departure for Harvard, where he was to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86. Reticent by nature, he was alwa

One of the most momentous stories of the last century is China’s rise from a self-satisfied, anti-modern, decaying society into a global power that promises to one day rival the United States. Chiang

This is the first book in English to analyze the Chinese literary scene during the post-Mao thaw in government control. The seven contributors originally presented their research at a 1982 internation

Ukrainian literature, reflecting a turbulent and often discontinuous political and social history, presents special problems to the historian of literature. In this book George Grabowicz approaches th

In reproducing sixty-six letters in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, plus eight letters orportions of letters previously published, thisbook offers one of the best sources availablefor the last fourte