Author: Bill Bass File Type: epub Dr Bill Bass work, and in particular his Body Farm, has furthered forensic anthropology and made it possible to prove from the discovery of a skeleton, no matter how much time has elapsed since death, how and when death occurred and to whom the body belonged. His work has been vital for the sake of science and the cause of justice In Beyond the Body Farm Jefferson Bass details the most memorable cases from his career, including alibis he has broken, cold cases he has solved - including one from the Ancient world that took him to Iran - and several cases he has been able to revisit throughout his career as new techniques have become possible and scientific discoveries made. This is what happens when Dr Bass goes beyond the Body Farm. **

Author: Elif Batuman File Type: epub One of The Economists 2011 Books of the Year hrhrTHE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTEDABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS hrNo one who read Elif Batumans first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. Babel in California told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babels last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babels secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batumans subsequent piecesfor The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, and the London Review of Books have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoys ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg retrace Pushkins wanderings in the Caucasus learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influenceincluding her own. **

Author: Kirsten Weld File Type: pdf In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemalas secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemalas bloody thirty-six years of civil war (19601996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the countrys National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemalas struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the countrys fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

Author: Richard Dawkins File Type: pdf A preeminent scientist -- and the worlds most prominent atheist -- asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 911.With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universes wonders than any faith could ever muster.From Publishers WeeklyThe antireligion wars started by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris will heat up even more with this salvo from celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins. For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says its the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religionsfundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobriumthat close peoples minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. While Dawkins can be witty, even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric the biblical Yahweh is psychotic, Aquinass proofs of Gods existence are fatuous and religion generally is nonsense. The most effective chapters are those in which Dawkins calms down, for instance, drawing on evolution to disprove the ideas behind intelligent design. In other chapters, he attempts to construct a scientific scaffolding for atheism, such as using evolution again to rebut the notion that without God there can be no morality. He insists that religion is a divisive and oppressive force, but he is less convincing in arguing that the world would be better and more peaceful without it. (Oct. 18) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From Scientific AmericanRichard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implicationsthe existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously. Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates through spiritons!and where it resides. Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite. George Johnson is author of Fire in the Mind Science, Faith, and the Search for Order and six other books. He resides on the Web at talaya.net The God Delusion caused a sensation when it was published in 2006. Within weeks it became the most hotly debated topic, with Dawkins himself branded as either saint or sinner for presenting his hard-hitting, impassioned rebuttal of religion of all types. His argument could hardly be more topical. While Europe is becoming increasingly secularized, the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or Middle America, is dramatically and dangerously dividing opinion around the world. In America, and elsewhere, a vigorous dispute between intelligent design and Darwinism is seriously undermining and restricting the teaching of science. In many countries religious dogma from medieval times still serves to abuse basic human rights such as womens and gay rights. And all from a belief in a God whose existence lacks evidence of any kind. Dawkins attacks God in all his forms. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry and abuses children. The God Delusion is a brilliantly argued, fascinating polemic that will be required reading for anyone interested in this most emotional and important subject.