Other books that might interest you

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  From Terrain to Brain - Forays...

  Erika Szymanski

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  In From Terrain to Brain, Professor Erika Szymanski makes wine science accessible to non-experts. Rather than approach wine science as body of facts about wine, Szymanski explores how wine science can open up multiple ways of seeing, understanding, and appreciating wine. 
   
   
   
  Too often, wine science is presented as a comprehensive body of knowledge that enthusiasts aiming to become experts should memorize. This book instead uses scientific research to explore wine as an endlessly rich cultural phenomenon. By foregrounding recent research and developments in wine science, From Terrain to Brain presents wine science as a work-in-progress rather than a codified body of knowledge. 
   
   
   
  Each chapter takes listeners on a journey or "foray" through a topic in wine science, such as minerality, climate, microbiome, and yeast. Chapters are organized from "terrain" (geography, terroir, soil) and cell "membrane" (microbiology) through "brain" (the experience of tasting) and "drain" (sustainability). Throughout, From Terrain to Brain emphasizes that wine science, wine culture, and tradition are interconnected and places scientific research in social and historical context.

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  The Education of Man - Aphorisms

  Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

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  Timeless words of wisdom from the eighteenth-century teacher who transformed the world of education with his groundbreaking ideas.    Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi rose to prominence during the Age of Enlightenment, bringing the spirit of equal opportunity and respect for human personality into the classroom, just as Thomas Jefferson imbued such virtues into the Declaration of Independence. The foundation of Pestalozzi’s educational philosophy rested on six principles: the inner dignity of the individual; the promise of potential in each child; love as the basis of education (as opposed to punishment); his doctrine of Anschauung, experience-based learning; appropriate action following Anschauung, and an emphasis on repetition of said action.   This philosophical grounding influenced the great remaking of American education from 1830 to 1860, resulting in changes that have been felt through the centuries and remain relevant today. The Education of Man gathers Pestalozzi’s enduring thoughts on subjects as wide-ranging as humanity, teaching, poverty, justice, truth, and nature, including such observations as . . .  People are led by custom and catchwords, but facts they are wont to overlook.  The man who seeks to rule as a father before he has learned to love as a brother will never be a patriarch.  Sooner or later, but of a certainty in the end, Nature will take her toll for what men do against her.  Learning is not worth a penny when courage and joy are lost along the way.  The world grows poor in seeking to avoid poverty; the man who strives for riches most earnestly is seen to be the poorest.

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  The Cooking of Books

  Ramachandra Guha

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  It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring.  
  The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir. 
  It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, when Guha was an unpublished PhD scholar, and Advani a greenhorn editor with Oxford University Press. It blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known – narrative histories which have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible. 
  Four decades later, though he no longer publishes his books, Advani remains Guha’s most trusted literary adviser. Yet they also disagree ferociously on politics, human nature, and the shape of their commitment to India. They usually make up – because it just wouldn’t do to allow such an odd relationship to die. 
  Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness. 
  In THE COOKING OF BOOKS, Ramachandra Guha presents an autobiography that is a testament to the power of reading, criticism, and language in shaping personal and historical narratives. It's a best-seller in the non-fiction genre, offering a unique perspective on the disciplines of the publishing industry in Asia. 
  For fans of Ron Chernow (Titan), Amartya Sen (Home in the World), Jonathan Eig (Ali), Walter Isaacson (Invent and Wander), and Sanjeev Sanyal (Land of seven rivers). 
  HarperCollins 2024

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  Fixer-Upper - How to Repair...

  Jenny Schuetz

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  Much ink has been spilled in recent years talking about political divides and inequality in the United States. But these discussions too often miss one of the most important factors in the divisions among Americans: the fundamentally unequal nature of the nation's housing systems. 
   
   
   
  And this divide deepens other inequalities. Increasingly, important life outcomes—performance in school, employment, even life expectancy—are determined by where people live and the quality of homes they live in. 
   
   
   
  Public policies enacted by federal, state, and local governments helped create and reinforce the bad housing outcomes endured by too many people. Taxes, zoning, institutional discrimination, and the location and quality of schools, roads, public transit, and other public services are among the policies that created inequalities in the nation's housing patterns. 
   
   
   
  Fixer-Upper is the first book assessing how the broad set of local, state, and national housing policies affect people and communities. It proposes practical policy changes than can make stable, decent-quality housing more available and affordable for all Americans in all communities.

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  The Tudors - The Kings and...

  Jane Bingham

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  The Tudor dynasty presided over one of the most dynamic periods in English history, an era that witnessed courtly conspiracies and public executions, religious reformation and exploration. Its fearsome monarchs transformed England from a minor medieval kingdom into a major player on the world stage. The Tudors reveals the complex personalities behind this powerful family, and the passions and jealousies that spurred them on. From the penny-pinching Henry VII to his profligate, wife-hungry son Henry VIII, and from the religious persecutions of Mary I to the ‘golden age' of her sister Elizabeth I, this is a gripping, entertaining romp through a fascinating age.

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  Can we make truth great again?

  François Noudelmann

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  During the 2024 US presidential campaign, the proliferation of lies reached an unprecedented level. This confirms that we have entered the era of post-truth and alternative facts. Beyond true and false, anyone can claim their interpretation and narrative. Is there a way to prevent fake news and political manipulation that threaten democracy?
  This essay traces the path that has led to this relativism over the last forty years on both sides of the ideological spectrum: the reign of storytelling, the empire of emotion, identity politics, victimization, autofiction, cancelation, philosophical deconstruction, the virtualization of the world by artificial intelligence… have all decimated universal reason. To save truth and the positivity of facts, François Noudelmann explores other resources, such as indignation in the face of lies and the alliance of doubt and revolt, which allow us to still believe in a common language.

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