Martin W. Lewis

Kären Wigen

In a thoughtful and engaging critique, geographer Martin W. Lewis and historian Karen Wigen re-examine the basic geographical divisions we take for granted. Their up-to-the-minute study reflects both on the global scale and its relation to the specific continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa actually part of one contiguous landmass. Photos. maps.

A Critique of Metageography

The Myth of Continents

Paul R. Gross

Norman Levitt

"Evidence of a flight from reason is as old as human record-keeping: the fact of it certainly goes back an even longer way. Flight from science specifically, among the forms of rational inquiry, goes back as far as science itself... But rejection of reason is now a pattern to be found in most branches of scholarship and in all the learned professions."--from the introduction In the widely acclaimed Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt offered a spirited response to the "science bashers," raising serious questions about the growing criticism of scientific practice from humanists and social scientists on the academic left. Now, in The Flight from Science and Reason, Gross and Levitt are joined by Martin W. Lewis to bring together a diverse and distinguished group of scholars, scientists, and experts to engage these questions from a wide variety of perspectives. The authors take on critics of science whose views range from moderate to extreme, from social constructivists to deconstructionists, from creationists and feminists to Afro-centrists. They discuss the rise of "alternative medicine" and radical environmentalism (here skewered as "ecosentimentalism"). They explain why the "uncertainty principle" does not work as a metaphor for ambiguity, and why "chaos theory" cannot be invoked without an understanding of mathematics. Throughout, they grapple with the paradox inherent in arguing with opponents who contend that reason itself, and thus logic, is suspect. Distributed for the New York Academy of Sciences

The Flight from Science and Reason

Asya Pereltsvaig

This book challenges media-celebrated evolutionary studies linking Indo-European languages to Neolithic Anatolia, instead defending traditional practices in historical linguistics.

The Indo-European Controversy

Development of truck gardening in the cool highlands of northern Luzon, an area perfectly suited to the cultivation of temperate vegetables, gained momentum after World War II. Martin Lewis describes engagingly the economic and social life of Buguias and the centrality of religion during the first four decades of this century, the complete destruction of prewar agriculture and animal husbandry in 1944, and the explosion of commercial farming thereafter. Unaccustomed prosperity reinforced the religious practice of lavish communal feasting, which not only honors the dead and bolsters the status of the living but also brings "good luck" to the host farmer's enterprise if the ritual succeeds in placating the ancestors. Heavenly favor thus overshadows sound environmental practices, and the region's inhabitants are quite literally wagering their lands in the hope of gaining prosperity and prestige

Martin W. Lewis

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