Sunday 15 September 2013

Apollonius Conics Books V to VII

Apollonius Conics Books V to VII: The Arabic Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banū Mūsã, edited with English translation and commentary by G.J. Toomer, published by Springer-Verlag (New York / Berlin / Heidelberg / London / Paris / Tokyo / Hong Kong), 1990.

Saturday 14 September 2013

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: the lasting legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: the lasting legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation by Edgar H. Schein with Peter DeLisi, Paul Kampas, and Michael Sonduck. Published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco), 2003.

Friday 13 September 2013

Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-occupied Hungary by Tivador Soros

Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-occupied Hungary by Tivador Soros, edited and translated from the Esperanto by Humphrey Tonkin. With forewords by Paul and George Soros. Published by Arcade (New York), 2001.

Originally written in 1965, three years before Soros's death, this may be the only book in my library system originally written in Esperanto that doesn't have Esperanto as its subject.

Humphrey Tonkin, a professor emeritus at the University of Hartford, is the author of Esperanto, interlinguistics and planned language, published in 1997 as a Paper of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, and is the chair of a lot of education and language organizations according to this conference program.


Thursday 12 September 2013

Apollonius of Perga: On Cutting Off a Ratio

Apollonius of Perga: On Cutting Off a Ratio: An Attempt to Recover the Original Argumentation Through a Critical Translation of the Two Extant Medieval Arabic Manuscripts, translated by E.M. Macierowski, edited by Robert H. Schmidt, published by The Golden Hind Press (Fairfield, CT), 1987.

Islamic Astronomical Instruments by David A King

Islamic Astronomical Instruments by David A. King, published by Variorum Reprints (London), 1987.

Consists mainly of reprinted journal articles in their original typefaces, such as "The Medieval Yemeni Astrolabe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York;" "Nasţūlūs the Astrolabist Once Again;" and "Le cadran solaire de la mosquée d'Ibn Ţūlūn au Caire".

By the way, the ţ's with commas under them are actually t's with dots under them in Arabic transcriptions. I can't find a way to encode a t with a dot under it in HTML.

Insects and Hygiene by James R. Busvine

Insects and Hygiene by James R. Busvine, published by Methuen (London), 1996

Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England

Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England by Caroline Bicks, published by Ashgate Publishing (Aldershot, Hampshire / Burlington, VT), 2003.

From the title, and the chapter titles, this looked totally arcane and pointless as an idea for a book, but it actually draws on a lot of interesting first-person historical documents, starting out with an account of King Louis XIII's (a long-awaited male heir) birth in 1601. Here's midwife Louise Bourgeois speaking (her 1617 "How and When the Queen Gave Birth" was itself newly translated in 2000):

He asked me at every hour if the queen would soon give birth and what the infant would be. To quiet him, I said yes. He asked me again what the baby would be. I told him that it would be whatever I would like. "What," he asked, "isn't it made?" I said yes, that it was a baby, but that I could make it a boy or a girl, whichever pleased me. He said, "midwife, since it depends on you, put there the pieces of a boy."


Chapters:

1. Lurking in the Gossip's Bowl: Men's Tales and Women's Words

2. "Sometimes the Midwives break it": Pressing Maids and Making Women

3. "As God makes, so the Midwife shapes": Crowning Heads and Reforming English Bodies

4. Stealing the Seal: Baptizing Women and the Mark of Kingshep

5. "(Miraculous) Matter": Lucina at Ephesus and the Churching of Women

Epilogue: Lucina in London