The study of literature and the environment evokes and promotes this highly original eco-critical collection and its contributions to evaluating the preservation of nature and human attachment and to situate it at a local, communitarian, or bio-regional level. Revisiting eco-literature can aid our exploration of numerous global issues and challenges through a literary rendition of the natural world in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Reflecting on different works will prompt the readers to intensify their search for viable and effective choices and healthy alternatives in a confusing world.

Seymour W. Itzkoff is one of the world’s leading intelligence researchers. His exciting new book Our Unfinished Biological Revolution offers a bold and highly original new study on the evolution of human intelligence from the origin of life to our times. With the help of evolutionary theory, Itzkoff explains the nature of human intelligence as we know it today.

In Redefining Eternity: Interfacing Immortality in the Digital Corporate World, Bethany Crawford critically assesses the implications of “digital immortality” for central tenets of the human experience - such as consciousness, death, and time - as a preliminary mapping of the shifting existential paradigms of the digital age. This groundbreaking new book explores the social consequences and provocations of a digitally replicable subject in the current sociopolitical context.

“Kadar has lifted our understanding of Semmelweis to an entirely new level.” K. Codell Carter, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Brigham Young University

Top analyst Leslie Gruis’s timely new book argues that privacy is an individual right and democratic value worth preserving, even in a cyberized world. Since the time of the printing press, technology has played a key role in the evolution of individual rights and helped privacy emerge as a formal legal concept.

In this extraordinary history, James Driscoll reveals the untold story of how AIDS activists, by thwarting bureaucratic plans imposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), both saved HIV patients and rescued the FDA itself from a self-inflicted public health catastrophe.

This collection of essays comprises a series of think-pieces about the security challenges of the present, both in the realm of cyberspace and otherwise, with a particular consideration of the promise and possible negative effects of new digital technologies. French military academy instructor Gérard de Boisboissel considers the contemporary digital transformation of his country’s military and proposes ways to ensure its maximum effectiveness.

In our contemporary world, the competing narratives of nation states bypass their common origins in antiquity - not only those fought over between Greece and Rome but the cohesion of evolution's first community recorded in the myth of Gilgamesh and its Biblical equivalent. As far as philosophy is concerned, David Kuhrt argues in this incisive collection of essays, doubt about the motivation of human conduct and truthfulness is prerequisite.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity’s basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding.

In this stimulating and timely book, Scott Bailey, an American teaching Russian and Eurasian history in Japan, traces the history of the dynamic Russian Geographical Society, which carried out major research expeditions to Central Eurasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immediate goal of its expeditions was to collect ethnographic, geographic, and natural-scientific information on these regions and their peoples. Their wider benefits established and extended Russia’s imperial control in Central Eurasia, including some regions under direct or indirect Chinese control.