Bøger af Michael Shapiro

In My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge, Michael Shapiro devises a storied diary that views the world through the eyes of an inimitable woman whose being and essence are determined by her superlative and penetrating intellect. Inspired by the great Japanese literature by upper-class women writers of the mid-Heian period, eighty-four masterfully woven sections alternate prose, poetry, social commentary and haiku-like vignettes to tell a fascinating tale of betrayal, revenge and undying love. Cruelly and unjustly exiled, Lady Murasaki, accompanied by her consort, Prince Towa no Ai, is the virtuoso author of learned discourses on the Western literary heritage, especially the Divine Comedy and Provençal poetry. The narrator's skein moves the characters along a topography that has them migrating asynchronously between contemporary California and interwar Tokyo, Budapest and Moscow, ancient Israel and the medieval Romance world, Freiburg and New York, rural Alabama and Vermont. Characters and chronologies are scrambled and reconstituted, real and imaginary events and places commingled, as Lady Murasaki brings her vast knowledge of art and literature to bear on explorations of medieval and Renaissance literature and the labyrinthine fictions of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. Her dialogues engage interlocutors that run the gamut from Satan and Pontius Pilate to Dante himself, as well as a giant humanoid cat. Through it all and to the end, including her final attainment of retributive justice, Lady Murasaki is wedded to Prince Towa no Ai, and it is their real-life love story that animates everything.

A fusion of memoir, family chronicle, and author's commentary that provides a fascinating view into the lives and minds of two passionate scholars, and the rarefied and often treacherous universe in which they lived. Told with conviction and wry humor, Palimpsest of Consciousness traces the author's life from his beginnings as a stateless Russian child in pre-World War II Japan through his eventual journey to the United States, his meeting and marriage to the Dante scholar, Marianne Shapiro, and their life together. Along the way, we glimpse an extraordinary world, a place where classical music, baseball, ballet, a brother behind the Iron Curtain, a decades-long vendetta by corrupt academics, a family scattered across the continents, a birthday party for General MacArthur's son, and Hollywood High School co-exist in an unconventional balance. Towering above everything is the story of the couple's steadfast love for each other and for their magical daughter. But most delectably of all, the author reveals the real-life villains behind the academic scandal that fueled his earlier groundbreaking work, My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge. Illustrated by photos from the author's personal collection, Palimpsest of Consciousness recreates the times and multicultural milieux of an exceptional family moving through a singular era of world history.

In a unique collection of essays and poems written in English, French, German and Russian (with a seasoning of Greek and Japanese), Constantine Shapiro explores fascinating universal questions and connections. Why, he asks, do so many people feel unhappy? Why do so many go to the doctor? Why is there so much criminality? Why is there international unrest? What is a healthy soul? In his investigation of these and other "Big Questions," the author examines such disparate areas as Japanese kanji ideograms and personal character, spiritual ontology and science, Zeus and Christianity, objectivity and subjectivity in time and space, the nature of experience, and the flow of consciousness. The modern reader will find much to ponder in this second, expanded edition of Selected Writings. Also included are facsimiles of the typescript of Two Mathematical Problems and the Japanese translation of Transzendentale Musiklehre.

The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time

One snowy Christmas eve, Santa runs into an unexpected problem while he's out delivering gifts and he's forced to make a difficult decision. Over time, he learns the power of forgiveness and that even those you've given up on, might surprise you.

Young bees strike out on their own in a pirate ship in search of treasure. Captain Mark and the rest of the baby bees have the adventure of their lives as they run into a notorious villain bee.Can they get past the villain bee and get the treasure?

The specific field of scholarship in which this book falls is sociolinguistics¿¿more concretely, the explanation of social variation in language, or the meaning and motivation of language change in its social aspect. It is directly concerned with the rational explication of linguistic variety as evidenced by spontaneous innovations in present-day American English. I examine the ascription of social value to novel linguistic entities, as one of the areas in which the effects of spontaneous innovations are most notable. A special feature of the data is the plethora of examples drawn from media and colloquial language. The Semeiotic Appendix provides the reader with a theoretical background for the research embodied in the main text, relying on the theory of signs of the founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).

In Cinematic Political Thought, Michael J. Shapiro investigates aspects of contemporary politics and articulates a critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema. Reading such films as "Hoop Dreams, Lone Star, Father of the Bride II "and "To Live and Die in LA "through the lens of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, Shapiro demonstrates what it can mean to think the political both in terms of cinema studies and in wider aesthetic and social contexts.Cinematic Political Thought is a polemical work, aimed at encouraging critical, ethical and political thinking. Its breadth of theoretical scope and empirical reference, and the innovative style of presentation will make it vital reading for anyone with an interest in the conjunction of culture and politics.

The creative spark resides in all of us, but some activate that spark more than others. In 50-plus interviews, musicians, authors, explorers and chefs speak about what drives them, how they see in fresh ways, and what inspires them to turn their visions into art.

The purpose of this book is to develop the foundations of the theory of holomorphicity on the ring of bicomplex numbers. Accordingly, the main focus is on expressing the similarities with, and differences from, the classical theory of one complex variable. The result is an elementary yet comprehensive introduction to the algebra, geometry and analysis of bicomplex numbers.Around the middle of the nineteenth century, several mathematicians (the best known being Sir William Hamilton and Arthur Cayley) became interested in studying number systems that extended the field of complex numbers. Hamilton famously introduced the quaternions, a skew field in real-dimension four, while almost simultaneously James Cockle introduced a commutative four-dimensional real algebra, which was rediscovered in 1892 by Corrado Segre, who referred to his elements as bicomplex numbers. The advantages of commutativity were accompanied by the introduction of zero divisors, something thatfor a while dampened interest in this subject. In recent years, due largely to the work of G.B. Price, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of these numbers and, more importantly, in the study of functions defined on the ring of bicomplex numbers, which mimic the behavior of holomorphic functions of a complex variable.While the algebra of bicomplex numbers is a four-dimensional real algebra, it is useful to think of it as a ¿complexification¿ of the field of complex numbers; from this perspective, the bicomplex algebra possesses the properties of a one-dimensional theory inside four real dimensions. Its rich analysis and innovative geometry provide new ideas and potential applications in relativity and quantum mechanics alike. The book will appeal to researchers in the fields of complex, hypercomplex and functional analysis, as well as undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in one-or multidimensional complex analysis.

This book provides the foundations for a rigorous theory of functional analysis with bicomplex scalars.

A prize-winning investigative journalist illuminates the often problematic relationship between the child's best interest and the best intentions of child welfare agencies, policymakers, and the courts

In A Sense of Place, journalist/travel writer Michael Shapiro goes on a pilgrimage to visit the world's great travel writers on their home turf to get their views on their careers, the writer's craft, and most importantly, why they chose to live where they do and what that place means to them.