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The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern
Before the mid-seventeenth century, scholars generally agreed that it was impossible to predict something by calculating mathematical outcomes One simply could not put a numerical value on the likelihood that a particular event would occur. Even the outcome of something as simple as a dice roll or the likelihood of showers instead of sunshine was thought to lie in the realm of pure, unknowable chance. The issue remained intractable until Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre de Fermat in 1654, outlining a solution to the “unfinished game” problem: how do you divide the pot when players are forced to end a game of dice before someone has won? The idea turned out to be far more seminal than Pascal realized. From it, the two men developed the method known today as probability theory. In The Unfinished Game, mathematician and NPR commentator Keith Devlin tells the story of this correspondence and its remarkable impact on the modern world: from insurance rates, to housing and job markets, to the safety of cars and planes, calculating probabilities allowed people, for the first time, to think rationally about how future events might unfold. .
Price: $7.50
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Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer’s images captivate us with their beauty and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The officer’s dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Those beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There—with silver mined in Peru—Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Moving outward from Vermeer’s studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe. The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were “an inventory of the possible.” Vermeer’s Hat shows just how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood. .
Price: $13.00
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B: The Sixteenth Century/The Early Seventeenth Century
Read by millions of students over seven editions, The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains the most trusted undergraduate survey of English literature available and one of the most successful college texts ever published. Firmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies—thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible— The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones. Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool..
Price: $18.00
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Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is here. A monumental literary feat that follows the author's critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Cryptonomicon, it is history, adventure, science, truth, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death, and alchemy It sweeps across continents and decades with the power of a roaring tornado, upending kings, armies, religious beliefs, and all expectations. It is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight. It is a chronicle of the breathtaking exploits of "Half-Cocked Jack" Shaftoe -- London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds -- risking life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox ... and Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem to become spy, confidante, and pawn of royals in order to reinvent a contentious continent through the newborn power of finance. A gloriously rich, entertaining, and endlessly inventive novel that brings a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life -- a historical epic populated by the likes of Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, William of Orange, Benjamin Franklin, and King Louis XIV -- Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most original and important literary talents of our time. And it's just the beginning ... .
Price: $8.55
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The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)
The Jesuit Relations is a massive, 73-volume library of French Jesuit missionaries' perspectives on Native North America in the 17th century Due to the vastness of the collection, these documents, vitally important in telling the story of early American encounters, have been virtually unteachable until now. Allen Greer deftly binds them into a collection, and his introduction provides background on these Jesuits, the Natives, and their co-habitation in early North America. Greer has created a rich resource of journal entries by famous missionaries as well as a wealth of natural history, ethnographic detail, and travel diction through firsthand accounts of early American history. .
Price: $8.98
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Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle #1 (The Baroque Cycle)
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Grantville Gazette III (The Ring of Fire)
A mysterious cosmic force -- the "Ring of Fire" -- has hurled the town of Grantville from 20th century West Virginia back to 17th century Europe, and into the heart of the Thirty Years War. With their seemingly magical technology, and their radical ideas of freedom and justice, the time-lost West Virginians have allied with Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, to form the United States of Europe, changing the course of history -- in ways both small and large. University students, a restless breed in all centuries, become even more rambunctious in Cambridge, England because of the personal and theological impact of the time-lost Americans. At the same time, American teenagers conquer new financial worlds when their elders are looking the other way. A Lutheran pastor schemes to gain new adherents among the Americans. A Benedictine monk finds a new calling for his order. Practitioners of 20th century medicine and its 17th century counterpart struggle to find common ground in healing the sick and injured. These and other new stories -- including a new story by Eric Flint himself -- return the reader to one of the most popular series in alternate history science fiction..
Price: $3.95
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Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives
As she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living "on the margins" in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America. Yet these women--one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant--left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history. All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de l'Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America. Her letters are a rich source of information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, and Iroquois peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands. Drawing on Glikl's memoirs, Marie's autobiography and correspondence, and Maria's writings on entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life. She reconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences of the time--childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular literature--and in relation to men. The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe's troubled and ambivalent relations with other "marginal" peoples. .
Price: $17.50
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